Appendix A – Statement of originality

STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY

I, …………………………(name) (Neptun code: …………………, place and

date of birth: ……………………………………………) hereby declare under
penalty of perjury that the present thesis is my original work; it does not contain
parts taken literally from any other work apart from those explicitly marked as
quotations, and I have in all cases indicated the source of paraphrased content
originating from other people’s work in the form of in-text citations.

I further declare that I have never previously submitted the present thesis or any
part thereof for a degree or academic credit at Corvinus University of Budapest
or any other institution, and I have not misled my supervisor with regard to the
above facts.

I understand that if there is evidence that the present thesis is not my unique
work, I have falsely presented any part of it as my own work, or I have
previously submitted the present theses or any part of it for a degree or
academic credit, the Institute of Behavioural Sciences and Communication
Theory will reject the acceptance of the thesis, and the Faculty of Social
Sciences may start formal disciplinary action against me. In addition, the
infringement of copyright law may have further legal consequences.

Budapest, …………………………(date)

…………………………………

signature

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 CORVINUS UNIVERSITY OF
BUDAPEST
Faculty of Social Sciences

Institute of Behavioural Sciences and Communication Theory

Sisters of Sylvia Plath:

The Discourse of Feminized Madness and the

Communication of the Mad Female Artists
Dorottya Tamás

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of a


Bachelor’s Degree in Communication and Media Science

Supervisor: Petra Dr. Aczél

2016.

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Table Content

Appendix A – Statement of originality .................................................................................................1

1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................5

1.1. Women and the Discourse of Madness .....................................................................................5

1.2. Binary oppositions: The Communication of the Mad Woman and the Genius Artist ..............7

2. A Historical Context: The Aesthetics of Female Suffering ............................................................10

2.1. “The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!” – The Femme Fragile and Its Cultural Tradition .............10

2.2. The Discourse of Feminine Madness in Some Eminent Female Creative Writers .................14

2.3. Selling Sickness of Women: Female Madness in Popular Culture .........................................18

3. “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.” – The Constructed Madness and Symbolisms of
Womanhood .......................................................................................................................................22

3.1. Caging the Identity: The Question of Identification with Womanhood ..................................22

3.2. “The girl who wanted to be God”: Communicating the Voice of Adolescent Girls ..............26

3.3. The Archetype of the Neurotic Housewife: Sylvia Plath and the Feminine Mystique ...........29

4. Discoursing Sylvia Plath as a Cultural Product .............................................................................34

4.1. Deconstructing the Sylvia Plath Myth ...................................................................................34

4.2. Sylvia Plath’s Readership: Discoursing the “Neurotic Sad Girls” and Sylvia Plath as a

Suicide Icon ....................................................................................................................................39

4.3. Who Has to Die? – Teenage Girl Culture Aesthetics and the Representation of Sylvia Plath in

Popular Culture ..............................................................................................................................44

5. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................49

5.1. An Attempt on Re-discoursing Women and Madness .............................................................49

5.2. Drawing the Future: Researches in the Field of Gender Studies, Art and Media Studies ......51

5.3. Writing It: A Young Female Artist Point of View ...................................................................52

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Appendix B – References and Works Cited .......................................................................................54

Appendix C – Poems Often Referred To............................................................................................58

Sylvia Plath: Daddy ........................................................................................................................58

Sylvia Plath: Lady Lazarus ............................................................................................................62

Anne Sexton: Consorting With Angels ..........................................................................................67

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1. Introduction
1.1. Women and the Discourse of Madness

As I was more involved in feminism and the communication of women, I sensed

that there is a topic which I wish to cover up, and like to get a deeper understanding of it.
Considering my interest in art (especially literature) I connected the dots from the public
interest in constructing female madness to Sylvia Plath’s role in popular culture.

What we consider mad or deviant is always dependent on symbolic social

constructions. The referent and reference of madness changes through time and place,
reflecting the values of a certain culture (Foucault, 1988). All societies have a stereotype of
how madness looks like and the stereotypes can diverse by gender. Alcoholism, substance
abuse is considered to be more a masculine type of mental illness, on the other hand,
hysteria, impulsivity madness is more feminine (Chesler, 1974). Nevertheless, these
stereotypes of madness and mental illness based on factual information that women and
men are affected with different kind of mental illnesses (WHO, 2013). Since the witch
burnings of the medieval period through Freud’s patriarchal penis-envy, until of the
romanticization the death of Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe and many other popular artists,
women have been in the centre of how we look at madness (Appignanesi, 2009). Patriarchy
has allowed that disorder categories like hysteria, postpartum depression provided a label
for a whole generation of women and put them in the box of dysfunctional mothers
(Friedan, 1963).

One of the key issues which I intent to focus on is why and how women (and young
girls) are present in the discourse of madness, mental illnesses, and how popular culture
represents it. Great deals of studies are focusing on the sexual dysfunction of women. The
female body, sexuality is another type of madness for patriarchy which has led to the
victimization, traumatization of women. Sylvia Plath represents a case study of a young
middle-classed woman of the fifties dealing with the limited choices of her life due the

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nature of her sex. As Elana Dykewomon, the lesbian writer and activist in Sinister Wisdom
highlighted it:

“Almost every woman I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge
of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard
constantly against ‘losing control’ — of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her
feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.” (Dykewomon, 1988/89)

The quote suggests the case that is women who put themselves into the “mad
woman” stereotype. However, the question again is whether this is because of the male
dominated society that they think of themselves as mad more often than men or it has some
reality in it. As well true that female madness is present in all cultures and affect all types of
women regardless of their status and background in the society: from the coming out of
mental illness of celebrities, through the mostly women-affected eating disorders and PTSD
from rape. Katie Milestone reflects the phenomena in her book, Gender and Popular
Culture that self-help literature considered as a female genre (Milestone, 2011). She quotes
Heidensohn referring to the double standard of women with deviant behaviour:

“Female binge drinkers are classed as worse, as more deviant and more of a
problem, than their male counterparts because they are “double deviants”.” (Heidensohn,
1985).

The double standards of women exist in all aspect of life. There are (still) a lot more
commonly accepted rules for women how to behave, talk, act “like a nice girl” than for
boys. Deviant women of the society are usually “punished”, looked down more than their
male counterpart. Bridget Jones’s Diary is one of the most popular case where a woman
reshapes the idea of being a woman. While a hundred years ago Freud psychoanalysed
women who were considered mad or deviant for rejecting the traditional roles of what they
were given in the society (Chesler, 1974). Young adult celebrities, mostly girls are often
portrayed in the media with the big scandals of losing control and not behaving as they
should, a role model for teenagers. The so called girls in crisis narrative also suggests that

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madness is connected to femininity, and the way we understand women (Meyer, Wood, &
Fallah, 2011).

1.2. Binary oppositions: The Communication of the Mad Woman and the
Genius Artist

As the proverb says, there is a fine line between the mad and the genius. The
connection between creativity and madness is a currently researched area of psychiatry and
psychology (Simon Kyaga, 2011). Art and the portrayal of artists is the field where the
gendered representation of madness can be depicted the most from the very high-brow art
(James Joyce’ schizophrenia versus Virginia Woolf’s mental breakdowns and suicide), to
the popular culture (Amy Winehouse versus Robin Williams). What is male madness? For
the popular culture, it is the tragic death of Kurt Cobain, the depressed loner poet, Van
Gogh, who cut off one of his ears. Male mental illness is a signal of the genius, it is
dominant, powerful, and something to be respected. However, it is not as thought-
provoking, not as talked in the eyes of public as in the case of female madness. As the
quoted article states:

“Media representations of madness among men are characterized by ‘‘toughness’’

and ‘‘purposiveness,’’ while women are constructed as emotionally damaged, regardless of
social class.” (Meyer, Wood, & Fallah, 2011)

Female insanity seems to be more interesting and much frequently mediated to the
public. For the sake of art, most of the creators experience hurt, loss, craziness. There are
artists who only can create art if they go through hell over and over. Simon Cross examines
the mediated communication of female madness (Cross, 2010). The book, Hours and the
movie made from it illustrates the very feminine notion of madness based on the biography
of Virginia Woolf. The world-class author is well-known not just for her incredible books
and the literary introduction of the stream-of-consciousness prose, but also her famous

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suicide letter written for her husband which is now available for everyone, and part of the
public memory.

“I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those
terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t
concentrate.” 1

The very early death of Sylvia Plath, the great American poet, became well-known
after committing one of the most disturbing suicides by putting her head in the oven and
gassing herself. Plath’s life and writings cannot be looked at without her death which has
been shaped by a cultural common knowledge. The mad female artist is not just a
stereotype, but a very notion of how we look at and interpret the production of art while we
differentiate between men and women. Kaufman names the phenomenon as The Sylvia
Plath Effect (Kaufman, The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers,
2001). It presents the experience of female poets who are the most vulnerable to mental
illnesses among all kind artists. In this context, Sylvia Plath has become the name of the
cultural phenomena of an impulsive, self-loathing mad poetess. The amount of female
artists who live in the shadows of Plath is uncountable. However, she was not the only one
in the history of art. In the book, Out of her mind: Women Writers on Madness Rebecca
Shannonhouse names several women writers who dealt with mental illnesses not just in real
life but in fiction also (Shannonhouse, 2003). In my thesis I would like to analyse the
discourse of Sylvia Plath, and the way she became a significant figure in popular culture
(mostly for young adult girls). As Woody Allen states in a different way:

“Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as

romantic by college girl mentality.” (Allen, 1977). This is the approach towards Plath and
women’s mental health which leads us to the gender inequalities we also encounter in the
field of art. However, importantly her death made her mostly well-known ad a cultural
phenomenon. Nevertheless, looking and Plath’s or any kind of artist’s work who committed
suicide only in the way as reading the signs of madness is dangerous and reduces the

1 Quote from Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter

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artistic value of it. I also wish to get to a feminist critical analysis as we look at madness
and mental illness, using Sylvia Plath’s case. After more than fifty years of her death, she is
loved and relevant not just as a poet but as a woman who stands for a generation and for the
“second sex” 2. Her cultural reproduction and mystification is constant in the twenty-first
century and she has been recognised for the high-brow culture just as much as the popular
teenager culture. The way we relate to Sylvia and her writing says a lot about us as a
society:

“And this makes me think that these are the poems we should be identifying for
readership by teen girls: those that point out what’s wrong with the culture, not necessarily
what’s wrong with the girl.” (Klaver, Arielle Greenberg and Becca, 2009)

The quote sums up the cultural phenomenon of being biased by the commonly
accepted way of thinking female madness. But how exactly we became obsessed with the
madness of women and girls? What shaped the discourse and keeps it popular today? As
the first chapter I will focus the discourse and different kind of communicational forms and
portrayals of the madness and women. The historical context is crucial when the feminized
madness is studied. As interestingly I will discover how the suffering and fragile women
became popular, and what effect it had to today’s popular culture.

2 Reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s classic book, The Second Sex

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2. A Historical Context: The Aesthetics of Female Suffering

2.1. “The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!”3 – The Femme Fragile and Its Cultural
Tradition

An enormous part of the discourse of female madness is how the mad woman has
been portrayed throughout the history of art. For thousands of years women have been the
passive role players in the illustration of themselves and their madness as well. In this
sense, men were the ones who used the madness of women in their art, represented it
visually and in texts and eroticized the two archetypes of women: the seductive and
dominating femme fatale and the weak and romantic femme fragile. The latter is not as
well-known in this name as its binary opposition, but has played a huge role in how we
interpret female madness. One of the most portrayed femme fragile in Western art history is
Ophelia from Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet whose victimized self and debated suicide
became a fantasy for many. Ophelia is the idealised young and beautiful woman and
demonised mad lover at the same time who died famously and aesthetically. Ophelia lives
in two worlds; her madness extends from the boundaries of Shakespeare’s play. In the text
her existence depends on the male characters, while Ophelia steps out from the play and she
begins to exist in the realm of our cultural memory where she lives in the fantasy of men
and the soul of women (Romanska, 2005). Hundreds of years later Shakespeare’s most
portrayed female character is still relevant in our way of looking at women and female
madness. Fetishizing the melancholic and vulnerable mad woman was not only an act of
Shakespeare, it has been present in every area of art history.

Romanska claims that Western art has eroticized the female corpse, the dying of
Ophelia became an art itself. She is the most important archetype of the feminine necro-
aesthetics, the femme fragile who has been portrayed by famous painters and reinterpreted

3 Quote from Eugene O'Neill’s play, Long Day's Journey Into Night

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later by female artists. The visual communication of Ophelia is almost the same in every
painting from the Pre-Raphaelites until today. In most of the paintings she is lying on the
water like a weak female whose body cannot hold itself together, she flows passively in the
water. Her gaze looks at the distance but there is nobody to see, only the ones who are
looking at her. Ophelia’s death is not human-like, she dies like “flowers, bees, and
tress” (Romanska, 2005), she is the nature, the beautiful dead who cannot be human. The
artistic nature in her death created a difference between the mad man and the mad woman
also. In the feminization of madness and the cultural tradition of femme fragile archetype
Ophelia’s mystic death has played a huge role. Her suicide in the play was never obvious
because Gertrude reported it later. Still, it is considered to be a fact that since Ophelia was
going mad she drowns herself into the water. The uncommunicating of the dying scene
became a playground for many artists who saw fantasy and secret of a mad woman’s death.
Even if it was a suicide, it was not committed only by herself, but the artists and the
audience not at last by the men in the play. Ophelia’s body politics lies in the
romanticization and eroticisation of the body of the femme fragile who has been
“kidnapped-by-patriarchal-culture” (Romanska, 2005). A man wrote Ophelia’s textual
character and until the recent centuries, she has been portrayed and reproduced as a product
and an imaginary figure of male artists. It is worth it to look at Ophelia in the point of how
her madness started – what kind of men like to see a woman going crazy like her? What
keeps her popularity through centuries?

The femme fragile is the woman whose existence is depends on men; her inferiority
makes her going mad. Ophelia’s madness is caused by patriarchy and the fact that she is a
woman. There are clear woman-man power relations between the Hamlet and Ophelia,
between the artists and Ophelia-as-art, and between the women who identify with Ophelia
and patriarchal art culture. The suicide of Ophelia cannot be looked at as only the act of a
crazy girl; it is cultural and political, nevertheless aesthetical. It was written to be looked at.
What makes Ophelia popular is not the fact Shakespeare’s art plays a great deal in our
Western culture, but the grounds she has been created, whether it was Shakespeare or the
phenomena of the femme fragile first.

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 The mythic of the femme fragile is that she is silenced – we will never know what
she thinks, what is her identity besides being the female victim of patriarchy. The binary
opposition of silence and voice, between dead silence and being alive and communicating
is the same symbolic and structural relationship as the power relationship between the
active men and passive women. Mary Pipher, a psychologist used Ophelia’s name in her
book where she analysed the structural silencing of the American girls in the 1980s-90s
who have been the victims of the girl poisoning American culture (Pipher, 1994). The book,
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls relies on the therapist’s
experiences with teenage girls in the United States. Adolescent girls are perfect material of
Ophelia, the femme fragile their essence is the voice which cannot be found in the structural
suppression of women and girls. She claims that the reason why many girls are suffering is
not penis envy but power envy (Pipher, 1994). Giving voice to Ophelia is might the biggest
achievement what happened to the character outside the text. The delayed voicing Ophelia
also can be looked at as a theatrical element is the great history of art. I used the quote as
the title (“The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!”) from the play writer Eugene O’Neill who was
famous for delaying the characters entrance in his plays. In the Long day's journey into
night he recalls Ophelia’s character for interpreting Mary’s late, highly dramatic and fearful
entrance in the fourth act (Bloom, 2004). Owen claims that Ophelia-poems in the German
tradition started with the first third of twentieth century (Owen, 2007). What male writers
have done with Ophelia’s tradition from Remould to Brecht is romanticization of the
female madness and usage of her death, as the essence of art. Ophelia’s passive dying
makes her more desirable for the male fantasy, she is the muse with the biggest
philosophical question of humankind (Romanska, 2005) – is it worth to suffer or better to
be dead? Romanska states that Ophelia in the play could not reach the intellectual distress
of Hamlet that he shows in the famous monologue with the “to be or not to be”, but in her
acts she was more capable to interpret the worth of suffering as Camus called it the
question of suicide (Romanska, 2005).

Ophelia’s delayed voice and intellectual fulfilment and was only a matter of
question when women will have the chance to communicate their emotions, thoughts. The

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identifiable character for female artists started much later than the romantic portrayal of her
death by men. Even though lot of male writers reinterpreted Ophelia, the tradition of
identifying with her is a practice what female artists often do when they want to
communicate the self-destruction and the dependency from the male lovers. Ophelia is
mediated into the twenty-first century, with no less madness and artistic suffering than in
the Elizabethan area. One of the many intertextualities is the poem of Susan B. A. Somers-
Willet, a contemporary American writer who reinterpret Ophelia into the urban world of
America in her poem, Ophelia’s Technicolor G-String: An Urban Mythology where the
narrator femme fragile is a go-go dancer. The vulnerability of her is not only emotional (the
love for Hamlet) but also physical with the gaze of the “fat man who sits in your place
[Hamlet] and sweats his love for me at 3 a.m.”.

Making Ophelia live today can be only achieved by reusing and reinterpreting the
femme fragile essence of her character. As a female archetype she will always be in our
cultural tradition with her pale ghostly face, destroyed-by-men soul and mad atmosphere
with a body that was made to be looked at. The cultural politics of who, when and how uses
Ophelia is a question of how we are looking at the discourse of female madness. Letting
women communicating the voice of the femme fragile is might be the first step to making
her live rather dead either caused by her or by men.

In the next subchapters I will examine the discourse of madness in the most
prominent female writers and how the writing of female madness started. Later I will
analyse the current state of the discourse of madness and representation of mad women.

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2.2. The Discourse of Feminine Madness in Some Eminent Female Creative
Writers

“Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the
pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn't
prevent it being reality itself. What's more I'd be crazy not to go crazy. We don't know what
an illness is. On awful hurts we plaster little old words, as if we could think hell with a
paper bandage.” (Cixous, Hyperdream, 2009)

It took centuries and even, more than thousands of years to achieve those women
could be the creative members of art history, and not just the subject of art, seen through the
male gaze (Mulvey, 1975). Or as Woolf put it, “Anon, who wrote so many poems without
signing them, was often a woman.” (Woolf, 1929). As consequently, women who have
become artists recreated their own experiences and have their own stories to tell. Madness
and the link between femininity has been highly shaped by women writers who experienced
the different forms of insanity while being victimized by patriarchy. Miquel-Baldellou even
states that the concept of womanhood is determined by the pathologies of patriarchy:

“The meaning of what it is to be a woman in a patriarchal society has traditionally

placed women within the domain of illness and pathology.” (Miquel-Baldellou, 2008).

In the book of Rebecca Shannonhouse she collected several famous cases in Out of
Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness which discovers the female madness from the
fifteenth until the twenty-first century. The discourse around women hardly changed, in
some extent is has been worse since the narrative shifted from matured women to teenage
girls, and the types of madness (pathologies) are increasing year by year. In the
Introduction of Shannonhouse, she questions the distinctions between madness and mental
illness:

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 “So what is “madness”? When is it mental illness? Or when is it the circumstances
of woman’s life driving her “out of her mind”?” (Shannonhouse, 2003).

The quote suggest that the differences are only socially constructed: mental illness
comes from the individual’s internal world ‒ however diagnoses differ from time and place.
Further, the discourse of madness says more about the society’s value system and power
relations. Mental hospitals are the symbolic intuitions where the deviant people are kept
away from the normal in order to maintain the society’s balance between the oppressed and
the oppressors. Female madness reflects back on patriarchy and the symbolic dynamics of
power between men and women. Many women writers from the eighteen century until
today publish their own memorials about the times they spent on psychiatry. In several
cases like the famous Zelda Fitzgerald, women are put into the mental hospital by the hands
of their male partner to the hands of the male doctors. This happened with Charlotte Perkins
Gilman who was sent into a psychiatric ward when she experienced “nervousness” after
giving birth to a child – today we refer to the situation as the diagnosis of postpartum
depression. The Yellow Wallpaper was published in 1892, it is considered to be a classic on
portraying female madness. The number of women communicating madness increased
greatly in the last centuries. Or may be better said, the dialogue of discussing the
interrelated causal relationship between women and madness could begin. Looking back at
Shannonhouse’s book it is clear that the last centuries’ writers are overrepresented.

Sylvia Plath is among those influential female writers, however Virginia Woolf, one
of the most famous twentieth century prose writers is not included who is well-known of
her “androgynous mind” in writing, and committing suicide. Virginia Woolf had the most
influential role in Sylvia Plath’s writing and the way she dealt with her madness. She highly
mentions the British writer in her journals referring to the similarities of their writing style
(“What is my voice? Woolfish, alas, but tough.” (Plath S. K., 2002)). She wonders about
female writers’ madness (“Why did Virginia Woolf commit suicide? Or Sara Teasdale - or
the other brilliant women - neurotic?” (Plath S. K., 2002)). Sometimes she even refers to
her as an inspiration, as a mentor of her writer career (“Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels

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make mine possible” (Plath S. K., 2002)). Plath admitted in her journals that she wants to
write about a “college girl suicide story”, and she even knew that there is an increasing
demand for “mental health stuff” (Appignanesi, 2009). Yet, she could never become the
saint of female victimization (Appignanesi, 2009) and a feminist icon of “sad girls” (Badia,
2011) if there was not a tradition of women writing about madness. Similarly to Sylvia
Plath her friend and female poet, Anne Sexton committed suicide in 1974. Her voice is not
as strong and not as genius as Plath’s, though female madness is a main theme in her
confessional poetry. In the poem, Consorting with Angel Sexton’s poetry writing is a
creative act while she suffered from a mental disorder:

“I was tired of being a woman, (…) and even my father came with his white bone. /
But I was tired of the gender things.” (Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, 1999)

Sexton’s repetitive tiredness is a symptom of depression. According to the poem it

is caused by the fact the she is a woman. How female writers communicate, interpret their
madness can be different, for some, having a mad state of mind was the trigger of an artistic
career. It was the same situation of Susanna Kaysen, the author of Girl, Interrupted (1994)
suffered from borderline personality disorder. The story of the mad and rebellious teenage
girl was made into a Hollywood movie in 1999. After Sylvia Plath an enormous number of
mental illness books have been published by women writers to a generally teenager or
young adult audience. The tradition the female victimization has continued in art but with a
different narrative. It shifted from the “mad woman” to the “crazy girl” which is partly the
result of the cultural changes and anxieties concerning teenage girls. The discourse of
female madness a core topic in the contemporary study of girlhood as well. On the other
side, there are hardly any books which narrative is focuses on male madness. The deviant
men are typically violent and aggressive, not in a feminine-hysterical way “mad” or “crazy”
which exaggerates the stereotypical trades of women and men as well. The debated
question for many is that in what extend and why women, especially artists are influenced
by madness when they perform creative actions? Kaufman and Baer studied the female
creative writers and they connection to madness and how creativity in artists link to/caused

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by mental illness (James C. Kaufman, John Baer, Bask in Dreams of Suicide: Mental
Illness, Poetry, and Women, 2002). It is commonly accepted that making art has a
therapeutic effect on the individuals, however in the mentioned study claims that prose and
poetry writers have a different kind of way of thinking and interpreting the world. An
external locus control for writing (muse) can cause more stress for the individual which can
lead to mental disorders. Women are especially affected with trying to find an external
control. The cause of this can be several, the study suggests that it links back to the
problematic and lower self-esteem in the case of women.

I mentioned the Sylvia Plath Effect in my introduction, the phenomenon was named
by Kaufman who interpreted the reoccurring madness of female poets with the famous
example of Sylvia Plath’s suicide (Kaufman, The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in
Eminent Creative Writers, 2001). In poetry writing madness can help in creating, while in
the case of prose writers it can have the opposite effect. (James C. Kaufman, John Baer,
Bask in Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry, and Women, 2002). The feminisation of
madness has led to stigmatization and such proverbs that “artists must suffer for creating”,
as it the performance of making art was the madness itself. The question was asked by
Susanna Kaysen also in her famous novel:

“Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the
hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in
madness?” (Kaysen, 1994)

What keeps the popularity of young mad women? With the increasing disorders and
pathologies, the glamorous side of suffering continued to grow wider. In the next
subchapter I will look at the current state of female madness and how the aesthetics
suffering can have an enormous part in the popular culture.

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2.3. Selling Sickness of Women: Female Madness in Popular Culture

“Madness is (…) probably every great moment in popular culture.” (Wurztel, 1994)

Sylvia Plath was right in the sense that there is an enormous demand for mental
health books – from women about women. The gendering madness has continued in
today’s popular culture and with different narratives and media attentions. Paradoxically,
the women who wrote about their madness or reinterpreted their experiences later by
writing a memoir contributed to the glamorizing and making female madness more popular
than it has ever been. Earning money from madness and getting attention for it seems a
good way of reaching popularity for the girls who are influenced much younger and more
to frequently with the idea of their femininity from the media. On the other side disorders
and pathologies among young women and girls rose enormously in the several last decades
parallel with this, female madness became mediatized. The erotic or glamorous gaze on
looking at the mad woman is present is every aspect of it. From the 1960s the usage and the
media attention of several psychopharmaceuticals emerged, newspapers and TV
advertisements started the marketing of the most frequently prescribed medications in the
United States. The tranquilizer, Valium was well-known as “mother’s little helper” by the
song of Rolling Stones. Prozac soon became the most popular mental health drug in the last
third of the twentieth century in America, while the mediatisation and burgeoning it
resulted a feminine character of the Prozac user (Stracuzzi & Blum, 2004). The
normalization of the gendered madness became a problem of feminist scholars who
investigated the relationship between the psychiatry and women from the Foucauldian
perspective of madness (Stracuzzi & Blum, 2004). Blum and Stracuzzi argue that the
medicalization of literature also was an effect of the popularizing Prozac and other
psychotic drugs.

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 The question in all of the cases is that should we consider madness/suffering as art
itself? Can madness be artistic without glamorizing it and making more people want to be
sick? When we interpret the gendered madness in the popular culture, it all looks the same
as in the history of art: men who suffer are genius therefore the binary opposition of them –
women must be mad and overly emotional. Can we look at a given artist’ madness without
gendering it and reducing it to exaggerated traits of her/his sex? Studying the current trends
of female madness we cannot. Women artists who use their madness as a source of art are
usually pitied, it is especially common among young girls. Many women write their
memorial about their madness in their adolescent years when there are older and mature for
reinterpreting it.

However it was not it the case of Sylvia Plath, nor in the case of Elizabeth Wurtzel
who was twenty-seven when she wrote the Prozac Nation in 1994 which became one the
main example of feminizing the psychopharmaceuticals. Wurtzel attempts to discover what
made her sick and suffer from bipolar depression from a very early age. The divorced
family with a carrying but perfectionist mother and a father who left her she was one of the
many where the tendencies of America’s culture lead in the 1970s. She explains that
madness is a word which is too glamorous for describing those people’s feeling who are
losing their mind (Wurztel, 1994). Prozac Nation was made in into a Hollywood movie
starring Christina Ricci as the main actress. Femininity has become the main form of
female madness while parallel with this eating disorders turn out to be the leading disorders
among young women. It looks like that with the controlling the female body and losing its
feminine traits – more in the case of anorexia nervosa – women want to lose not just their
femininity but the feminization of madness. Nevertheless, the result is the opposite,
especially when we look at the epidemic of eating disorders. In the 1970s-80s adolescent
girls suffering from anorexia emerged but starving among women is not only the
phenomena of capitalist societies. The first anorexic women were starving for religious
purity, not eating among women became popular in the Middle Age where they were called
“female miracles” (Brumberg, 1988). The refusal of food was connected to hysteria and
girlhood in the Victorian times, later in the early twentieth century starving was an act of

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the striking suffragettes (Brumberg, 1988). In the recent decades many feminist scholar
investigated the relationship between the starved female body, femininity and feminism.
After the Monroe-era in the consumerist America dieting became a fashion accessory for
women. Soon those who were not on a diet were considered deviant in the middle-class
American housewives. The changing femininity and idealized super thin models effected
generations of women who tried to shape their identity to be appropriate for social trends.
While living in a malnourished body, the thinner somebody becomes the more attention she
gets. Oldis reflect on the same phenomena in her journals when she questions the worth of
suffering versus the obsessive dieting (Oldis, 1986). In the journal she looks at the growing
popularity of anorexia in the point of view of the literature (either fiction or non-fiction)
published on it. The section of adolescent girls’ literature is full with memoirs from girls
suffering from eating disorders, and the fiction books on mental illnesses are increasing
rapidly just as the non-fiction literature and studies on disorders (Oldis, 1986).

In today’s culture adolescent girls grew up seeing Amy Winehouse’s popularity and
suffering from alcoholism and bulimia, they read tabloids and magazines where female
celebrities’ body is analysed inch by inch, and learn that every Hollywood actress must be
anorexic thin in order to be good enough for the male gaze in the cinemas. The female body
and its femininity became the battleground of Western societies, especially in the case of
young girls. In a lot of cases when depression follows anorexia girls are treated with
antidepressants in the recovery process (Brumberg, 1988).

The mediatisation of female madness in postmodernity normalised the stereotypes

of mad woman. The narrative of the “crazy girlfriend” is highly used in the popular
Hollywood comedies, women are seen as overly emotional and hysterical or out of their
mind when they are on their period. The hormonal changes in the female body are also
treated with medications, women even reported that the antidepressant, Prozac makes their
menstruation less painful (Stracuzzi & Blum, 2004). The discourse of madness in
modernity has been the topic of pharmacotherapy and psychology, and less the social
studies. The critical look at the mental disorders and gendering madness started from

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feminist scholars in the late twentieth century. Even the Prozac user, Elizabeth Wurtzel
questions the economical and societal reasons behind the emerging usage of medications
for disorders in the Afterword of Prozac Nation, in a reversed argument: first medications
are made then the disorders to sell the pills. In popularising madness the celebrity icons of
adolescent girls played a huge role. Lindsay Lohan is seen as one of the reckless and out of
control child celebrity who lived her crisis states with a whole media attention (Meyer,
Wood, & Fallah, 2011). Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and even Paris Hilton’s media story
narratives contributed to the discourse of the girls in crisis where drug usage, eating
disorders, excessive alcohol consumption, emotional instability and losing control made
them the “icons of female ruin” (Meyer, Wood, & Fallah, 2011). When girls are in their
early age their build their identities from the stories they see on magazine covers, TV
programmes and the shelf of adolescent literature.

If we teach adolescent girls that “crazy” and “mad” is the new sexy, they will
immediately follow the path of the uncontrollable stereotype of the mad woman. On the
other side, as Mary Pipher put it, the culture is that poisons young girls in the most sensitive
times of their life when they try to find their own voice. In the glamorising of female
suffering the media plays a crucial role. Nevertheless, as I drew the attention in the
previous subchapters, we live in the times where the communication of female madness can
be an act of women, who experience it. It is important to note that popularising madness
should not follow an obvious glamorising it. Instead of finding the aesthetics of suffering
the media also should draw the attention to the solutions and breaking the silence, and then
maybe the epidemic of disorders could stop. Today anorexia nervosa is the most deadly
disorder. In the last chapters I studied the path of discourse of female madness. In the next
sections

I will look at the importance of the symbolism and social construction of

womanhood by using Sylvia Plath as a case study. I also wish to question the connections
between Plath’s femininity and madness.


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3. “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.”4 – The Constructed
Madness and Symbolisms of Womanhood

3.1. Caging the Identity: The Question of Identification with Womanhood

For a critical look at the discourse of female madness, the definition of “woman”
and “feminine” are necessary. Searching at the frames of femininity and womanhood, and
differentiating between sex and gender is essential when reflecting on Sylvia Plath’s
identity as a woman. It was Simone de Beauvoir who firstly studied womanhood, in her
most famous book, The Second Sex she wrote: “One does not born, but rather becomes a
woman.” (Beauvoir, 1949). But what do we mean by a “woman”? In everyday situations
we identify the biological sex of a person as the main characteristics of her/his identity. On
the other side, “woman” or more like “feminine” refers to a set of symbolic, traditional,
structured procedures, behaviours by what identity is framed in a larger societal context.

The main question of studies related to gender is the most controversial and debated
one: is there a thing as essentially female? Judith Butler was one of the most well-known
philosophers who rejected the idea of essentialism. According to her, every act or
performance we do is socially and historically constructed, and from the very point of our
birth we reproduce the concept of gender-binary (Butler, 1990). Deconstructing the social
order and the identity helps to understand the importance of the biological sex and gender
in Sylvia Plath’s life and the interpretation of her as a female poet, not just a poet.

Men and women are rated in every social act in a scale where they are evaluated
how much they differ and correspond to the commonly accepted traits that are considered
to be feminine and masculine. For women such characteristics are the following:
dependent, emotional, passive, sensitive, innocent, weak, nurturing, self-critical, soft, and
sexually submissive, accepting. The masculine stereotypical characteristics are the opposite

4 Quote from the The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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of feminine which are independent, non-emotional, aggressive, active, self-confident, and
sexually aggressive (Gender & Gender Identity, 2014). The non-conformity of gender
norms, accepting or protesting against patriarchy was an ongoing question in Sylvia Plath’s
life, sometimes created cognitive dissonance between her emotions and her behaviour.

In her journals Plath expressed her anger and frustration many times towards the
expectations of society, and the double standards of female writers: “Frustrated? Yes. Why?
Because it is impossible for me to be God - or the universal woman-and-man- or anything
much. I am what I feel and think and do.” (Plath S. K., 2002). A diary is a medium for
reflecting one’s identity, and since Plath’s fragmented journals became available for the
public in 2002, the reader examines as well the identity development of a teenage girl
“Who Wanted to Be God” (Plath S. , Letters Home, 1999). In the process of reconstructing
Plath’s diary not just a person grows up but we can understand what it means to be a
woman and how Sylvia Plath relates to femininity, how her emotions and behaviours
changed which all are interpreted in a socio-cultural-political context. As every woman,
Plath had numerous experiences in her life which separated her biological sex and her
gender. When discourse and interpretation of (feminized) madness into the study of Plath,
the distinctions between biology and social construction is crucial: is the tragedy of being a
woman is patriarchy as Plath suggests? Is the strong connection between femininity and
madness everlasting and influences how we evaluate her as a mad female artist?

Rejecting the oppression and suppression as a woman is feminism, which can

defined many ways and interpreted in a philosophical, political and personal sense.
Nevertheless, the one thing we can all agree is that feminism is the belief in social, political
and economic equality of the sexes. I call a feminist one who wants to liberate women and
men from the historically, socially, culturally given norms and orders which are contra-
productive for the self-development and self-fulfilment. Sylvia Plath is seen today as a
feminist artist icon for many, however feminism was not clearly defined by the artist. Plath.
She is seen as the stereotype of mad woman victimized by patriarchy. She died at the age of
30 which made her more an icon of straight-As school girl from the Dreamland of America

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(Whittington-Egan, 1998) with Electra complex who wanted to be a famous poet more than
everything. Only she felt that she is hold back by the fact that she was born as a woman.
Was she a feminist? Probably. But the word “feminism” never was mentioned by the artist,
only in an indirect way:

“I hated men because they didn’t stay around and love me like a father: I could
prick holes in them & show they were no father-material. I made them propose and then
showed them they hadn’t a chance. I hated men because they didn’t have to suffer like a
woman did. They could die or go to Spain. They could have fun while a woman had birth
pangs. They could gamble while a woman skimped on the butter on the bread. Men, nasty
lousy men.” (Plath S. K., 2002)

Her conflict with men started in her childhood when at the age of eight her German-
born Jewish father died. She never could get over the loss and experienced it a rejection
from men. When she read her famous poem, Daddy in the BBC radio, she described it as it
a “the poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex”. Plath’s journals and her novel,
The Bell Jar represents her thoughts and experiences as a woman dealing with the
domesticated life in the middle of the twentieth century. While in her poetry she plays
different kind of roles and characters of women – which are partly real (Three Women,
Tulips) and partly represents the femme fatale personality she wished to have (Lady
Lazarus, Ariel) in order to liberate herself from the patriarchal control. Lady Lazarus “eats
men like air”. Can a woman go mad from the obsession over the self-liberation under the
control?

Some scholars of Plath see that the men in the life of Plath made her to decide
between life and death leaving her two children, Frida and Nicholas to the father, Ted
Hughes. Linda Wagner-Martin in her book, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life described Plath as
one of the first and well-known women in 1950s−1960s who refused to be only a nurturing
mother (Wagner-Martin, 2003). Later the ambivalences of motherhood became a huge
theme of her poetry after having a miscarriage and giving birth to two children.
Motherhood is still thought to be the most important life event is a woman’s life – after the

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ceremonial marriage. Yet the rebelling against patriarchy is emblematic in the character of
Sylvia Plath as an artist. The multiple relations and controversies makes her a great case
study and reference point in the portrayal of women and their madness. Many other
women/girls can identify with her through her works and her life while she became an
“icon and artefact” (Whittington-Egan, 1998) of her death. Plath herself was the first
stereotype of her readers, sometimes referred to as the girls obsessed with death or the
“neurotic women” (Badia, 2011).

Most of her poetry collections and her journals (The Unbridged Journals of Sylvia
Plath), letters to her mother, Aurelia (Letters Home) were published after her suicide. The
endless amount of critical studies and her influence in popular culture makes her more
significant after her death. Plath is reconstructed as a woman by herself and by the society
as a cultural product. Her cult could only arise for the reason that she stands for the “mad
female artist” stereotype. While she died at the age of 30 in the times when the second
wave of feminism just started to appear in the United States of America. She lived more
years as a child and teenager than an adult, symbolic and constructed self- and gender-
development of Plath played a crucial role in her life. Sylvia Plath was a feminine woman
in her times but she also suffered from the question of self-definition besides being born a
woman. Probably, she did not live enough to discover all advantages and disadvantages of
womanhood, but she was old enough for a case study.

In the next section I will look at how girlhood is constructed and, when exactly does
the female madness start is girls, and how it manifests in the life of Sylvia Plath.

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3.2. “The girl who wanted to be God”5: Communicating the Voice of
Adolescent Girls

“This is I, I thought, the American virgin, dressed to seduce.” (Plath S. K., 2002)

The study of girlhood is a recently developed interdisciplinary field which is

concerned about the culture(s) of adolescent girls, challenges the norms, behaviours, culture
in which the discourse of girlhood have been developed. Girl studies also looks at the
anxieties concerning adolescent girls, as they are one of the most defenceless social group.
The so called girl-crisis movement states that the poisonous patriarchy is the reason of why
girls fell into a crisis in their adolescent years (Farady, 2010). The adolescence years of
Sylvia Plath represents the discourse of girlhood, makes a clear connection between the
developing femininity and madness. Her journals are the most important source of the
reconstruction of her teenage years while it is well-known that her novel, The Bell Jar is
based on her suicide attempt at the age of twenty. Plath and her emerging madness in her
teenage years can be interpreted as a prediction of cultural anxieties regarding the girls’
mental health. In the last decades of the twentieth and the first part of the twenty-first
century the girls in crisis narrative became a real problem for the Western patriarchal
societies. Mary Pipher in her book, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
explains the cultural phenomena where madness of girls is nothing else but a rebellious and
escaping behaviour against the system of patriarchy where they suffer from the lack of
power. The pressure of growing up and being a woman became a huge narrative in the
popular culture also, as it was an anxiety of Sylvia Plath as well. When girls do not want to
fit into the social and cultural norms, escapism can be a solution besides “going mad”.

5 Reference from Sylvia Plath to herself in a letter to her mother, published in Letters Home: “I think I would
like to call myself "The girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be—
perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I—I am powerful—but
to what extent? I am I.”

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 Probably the most symbolic and illustrative interpretation of the adolescent Sylvia
Plath is the short animated movie based on one of her diary entry, The Girl Who Would Be
God (2007) directed by Suzie Hanna. The actress, Joey Cook who plays the animated Plath
who was the Snow White-like, mystic, feminine teenager. The narrative of the short movie
is build up on the cultural memory of Plath, the poem, Cinderella published in her journals.
Consequently her portrayal is more fictional and symbolises the girl who she liked to be
seen, “The girl who wanted to be God” (Plath S. , Letters Home, 1999). The seventeen
years old Sylvia is typing in her room which is representation of the girls’ private space, the
only place where they can get away from patriarchy and create their own world. Later this
phenomenon was defined as the bedroom culture of girls (Driscoll, 2008). A girl with a
room is the God of her own place. The fictional Sylvia is playing with the God role as she
is creating men for her paper puppet show. Later she even herself becomes a fictional
character and leave her room by getting out of the window. This performance represents the
symbolic act the creative wandering the mind. She arrives into a ball where she dances with
the handsome man like Cinderella did. In the end the fictional Sylvia returns to her room,
she seems happier as she wears her crown. Sylvia finds the perfect paper-man for her
paper-self for the puppet show. The narrative of the short movie can be interpreted as the
transition from girlhood to womanhood with the act of falling in love. The girl becomes a
woman in relation with a man. Just a couple of decades ago girls were still introduced to
the sexual “adult” world by the husband. The anxieties of girls and concerning girls is
growing parallel with losing the control over them as they become sovereign individuals
who can make decision regardless of patriarchal control. Plath as an adolescent girl was
worried about the changes of her body and herself, and the way she should accommodate in
society as an adult woman. She gave voice to her anxieties concerning losing the innocent
childhood while the “adult world means nothing but the changes of felling “(…) the sex
organs develop and call loud to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very
words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard,) bread and butter,
marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death and self.” (Plath S. K., 2002).

!27
 The animated movie directed by Suzie Hanna is based on the real experience of
Plath, with the real anxieties of finding the one and only love, a husband who will
substitutive the lack of male protection in her life and makes her fit into society. She grew
up and experienced girlhood and the beginning of womanhood in the 1940s-50s in the
United States where the post-war cultural trend was that women’s place is at home, who
has the task to bear the future’s America and serve the working husband. Being a mother is
a treasure, the identity of women, a life goal which every girl should share from early
childhood by playing with dolls. However Plath desired to be a writer, as stated in her
journals, the only barrier was patriarchy, and the male-dominated literacy world. Her anger
was almost neurotic towards the double-measures of women:

“Can I write? Will I write if I practice enough? How much should I sacrifice to
writing anyway, before I find out if I'm any good? Above all, CAN A SELFISH
EGOCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMAGITIVE FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING
WORTH WHILE?” (Plath S. K., 2002)

The reoccurring question is how girlhood, the phase of the development of

femininity is connected to the feminized madness. Especially in the case of Sylvia Plath,
there must have been signs of madness in her adolescent years, before overdosing at the
turning point when an adolescent is no longer considered a child but a conscious, decision
maker adult. Are the anxieties of growing up and the pressures of womanhood why a great
American girl, who was supposed to be having the time of her life 6 overdoses at the age of
twenty?

Some fifty years later the discourse of adolescent girls’ madness raised the attention
of psychopathology and social sciences as well. Plath and her legacy is the explanation and
the question as well to the growing number of mad or mentally ill teenage girls. As from
the case of Sylvia Plath, it cannot be denied that the link between femininity and madness
begins from the age when girls and boys are not seen any more equal, sexless humans but
young adults with developing bodies and self, and have their first experience their

6 Reference to the quote from beginning of The Bell Jar: „I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”

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sexuality. In the case of female sexuality, menstruation is the most visible and most
important experience of becoming a woman which is some cultures is still considered
deviant or shameful. Not at least in Western cultures where menstruation of “women’s
private thing”, where among girls getting their first period is crucial, almost a competition
which can establish a hierarchical social order as who is the most “grown-up” and
“feminine”.

Considering the fact that the study of girlhood is a developing field, the questions of
girls’ madness cannot be fully answered. It is not just the study field of social sciences but
psychology and psychopathology. Later in my thesis I will analyse the readership of Sylvia
Plath, as she stands an icon for the neurotic girls who rebel against patriarchy with a mad
state of mind as an escapism. In the next section I will examine the next phase of being a
woman where the battles of womanhood in Sylvia Plath’s life grew bigger and darker.

3.3. The Archetype of the Neurotic Housewife: Sylvia Plath and the Feminine
Mystique

The post-war America became main advertiser of the nuclear family life. It was the
role of women to maintain the loving atmosphere of home, since men could go back to
work. What else should have a woman do than to love her husband who has returned from
war?

Consumerism took advantage on the advertisement of traditional gender roles. From

a communicational point of view women were taught to identity with roles such as being a
mother, a housewife, a turkey-cooking husband-lover but never themselves. The problem
which had no name before Friedan was a societal-cultural one, and effected a generation of
women. But most of the American housewives suffered alone (Friedan, 1963) until the
problem was recognised as a deviant behaviour of women which an ideal housewife should

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not have. The unhappiness or/and nervousness of married women was diagnosed in the
name of different kind of disorders, some which never existed before. Even women
believed that the problem could be solved by (male) psychiatrists and some more knitting
while the children are at school and the respected husband is at work earning the money for
the family.

Friedan also reminds us that some luckier women could work, but most of them
were assigned to jobs which are considered to be the most stereotypical and sometimes
sexist ones, such as secretaries and elementary school teachers. In Friedan’s book a female
journalist explains that they were reminded all the time to write articles in a way that
women can identify with them. For the women’s magazine identifying means highlighting
the stereotypical performances of domestic life of women. Plath’s paradox lies here: she,
who felt damaged by the patriarchal society and the pressure of getting married, was
writing for women’s magazines also which gained popularity in the 1940s-50s.
Nevertheless, she was aware of the quality and the ideology of magazines such as Ladies'
Home Journal and Mademoiselle. In the latter she spent a summer a student in New York.
The experiences inspired her novel, The Bell Jar, published in 1963.

In her adult life Sylvia Plath was one of those American housewives, though she
constantly tried to escape from the traditional domestication by writing and publishing. A
core theme of her poetry writing were the elements of domestic life, she claimed in her
journal that everything is a raw material (Plath S. K., 2002) for writing, no wonder that she
could communicate every little piece of the madness of domestic life of women which
Betty Friedan compared to the Nazi prison of Jews: “They were taught to pity the neurotic,
unfeminine, unhappy, women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents.” (Friedan,
1963)

The marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath is considered to be one of the most
famous relationship of two poets in the art history. After the fairy-tale like love at the first
sight meeting in a party in Cambridge, where Sylvia Plath was studying with a scholarship,
they married in June 1956 (Wagner-Martin, 2003). Ted Hughes’s poems gained popularity

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while Sylvia remained the modern all-American, husband-serving housewife whose poetry
writing became more pathological and more unique in time (Whittington-Egan, 1998). The
love of the poets was passionate and destructive – for Plath, at least. After her suicide in
1963 she grew popularity while today, Ted Hughes is demonised by many radical feminists
who see him as the cheater husband, the oppressor in Sylvia Plath’s life and the ultimate
cause of her death. Looking at the marriage as the manifestation of the tragedy of women,
especially in the case of Plath, it is not surprising that Ted Hughes is not loved by many. He
remained the main controller and critic of Plath’s writing, referring to her privilege as the
main interpreter who has the texts. Nevertheless, Ted and their daughter, Frida Hughes have
had an ongoing battle and defence concerning Plath and her readers (Badia, 2011).

Sylvia Plath’s only novel was published in January 1963, under the pseudonym,
Victoria Lucas. Her semi-autobiographical work, The Bell Jar is recognised as one of the
most important book of portrayal of female madness and the force of young women into
marriage and the traditional role of women which was republished after her death under her
own name. Moreover, both The Bell Jar and The Feminine Mystique has appeared on the
market on the same year, 1963 (Appignanesi, 2009). Both of the books are about women
and both of them discover the role of women in the United States of America after the
Second World War. While Plath’s novel is a semi-autobiographical writing about a twenty
year-old girl who lost her identity in the male-dominated society and recovers after
attempting suicide, Friedan studied the domestic world of middle-class women who
unconsciously lost their identities by preparing themselves from their teenage years to be
primarily a mother and serve their husbands. These are the women who suffer from the
problem which doesn’t have a name (Friedan, 1963) and fell into the arms of male
psychiatrists who could cure the disease. Sylvia Plath’s domestic poetry resembles to the
experiences of everyday life’s struggles and actions of women. Dobbs highlights, that Plath
discovers over and over femininity and the fight of a woman who is trying to find herself in
balance with career and family life. (Dobbs, 1977). The symbolic voice and silence of

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women could be detected in the housewife-years of Sylvia Plath, who used writing as a
form of escapism from the forced roles. In her poetry she gives voice to the female-male
sexually passionate but destructive relationship which she experienced with Ted Hughes.

Sylvia Plath also interprets the suppression of one’s voice in the poem Lesbos: “Sad
hag.”Every woman's a whore. /I can't communicate."”. The symbolic silence, losing
identity with losing voice is considered to characteristics of the 1950s’ American
housewives. The verse strengthens phenomena: the woman who has a voice must be a
whore, a deviant. The woman who is in silence (Plath) a perfect housewife, but rather she
suffers inside. Betty Friedan puts the emphasis on the verbalization of women’s problem
also. She was the first one who formulated that the generational troubles of the American
housewives which she considered as a structural one. It has no connection with diagnoses
but rather with the culture which makes women sick. The woman who is silenced has no
identity only just roles to play. The woman who suffers from the problem which before
Friedan didn’t have a name must a housewife.

Plath never could have been famous for being mentally ill and committing suicide if
the field of psychopathology was not enormously developing with the contrast of the rising
feminist movement in 1960s–70s. The way she committed suicide, putting her head in the
oven and gassing herself, is seen the symbolic rebellion against the traditional roles of
women, making her the ultimate feminist artist whose death is caused by patriarchy. The
problem didn’t just affected Plath, and a generation of women but the archetype of the
neurotic but seemingly happy housewife can be found in several cultural context even in
today’s popular culture. In the book Hours and the same titled Oscar-winning movie the
narrative focuses on three women’s life in different ages who are connected by the novel of
Virginia Woolf. The second story-line is about Laura, the perfect housewife of the 1950s’s
America who is contemplating committing suicide. Sylvia Plath can be seen as a reference
in the song lyrics of the pop singer Marina and the Diamonds who recalls Plath in her
album Electra Heart, referring to her in the song Su-Barbie-A: „If you're going to tell me
you don't like this dress/ I'm sticking my head right in the oven”. Sylvia Plath’s death is a

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cultural phenomenon which is analysed, reinterpreted by artist many times. Stella Vine, a
figurative painter redesigned an oven and named it the Sylvia cooker which she decorated
with a stanza from the poem Daddy, and a painting about Sylvia Plath who is crying but
seemingly smiling, her make-up is smudged from the tears. (ed: Sally Bayley, 2011). The
hyperrealism of the Sylvia Plath myth is not just a fictionalization of the great female poet
but also a warning sign against the system which makes women sick to death.

The discourse of the mad woman and the emotionally wrecked female artist would
not be complete without the archetype of the neurotic housewife. Those women who are
brave enough to communicate the systematic problem of patriarchy are usually labelled
deviant or looked down on. Friedan emphasises that the problem of role crisis cannot be
solved only by psychotherapy or medications, the “drastic reshaping of the cultural image
of femininity” (Friedan, 1963) is needed, which is a work in progress. Artists, such as
Sylvia Plath remain an example of crisis of femininity and idolizing the female victim who
cannot fought the battle against patriarchy, but make rather dies, and in the process she
makes dying look like an art 7.

In the next chapter I will keep the focus on Plath as I approach her popularity and
media attention. The Plath myth is a secret of the mad female artist, while her madness
extends from the boundaries of her personality by popularising and fictionalising her in
girls’ culture.

7
“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.”
Quote from Sylvia Plath’s poem, Lady Lazarus

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4. Discoursing Sylvia Plath as a Cultural Product

4.1. Deconstructing the Sylvia Plath Myth

Sylvia Plath’s identity is limited to the text and mediated documents (such as
photographs and voice recordings) which remained after her death and the way she has
been read. As a discourse, she is merely a product of her writings, mediated documents and
the idea of what the audience perceived and created from all of these elements. Scholars of
Plath always faced with the same question: is it enough to know Plath just from her
journals and fiction writings? Can we understand Sylvia Plath and her influence without her
suicide and pathologies? Jaqueline Rose admitted in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath that an
autobiographical writing cannot be done because our knowledge about Plath as a person is
limited; Sylvia Plath is merely fictional, she became the victim of her own self-mythology.

Who are the mythological figures of Plath and who she became as a myth? Plath
called herself the transcendent God of lioness Ariel, Lady Lazarus, rising from her death in
poetry, she was “white goddess” and “queen-bitch superego” in her journals. Plath wrote to
her mother in letters that she was “The girls who wanted to be God”. Her own self-
mythology was a respond to the tension between women and writing and the question of
self-definition, especially in the text. She did what many other women writers do –
transcended herself beyond the sexual/textural body. Nevertheless, a mythology as such can
be beneficial for women who feel controlled over the discourse of writing as a woman, it
can be dangerous I the point of view of the author. Plath was turned into an icon, she has
been referred to as the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature (Rose, 1991), who became as
well fetishized for her mysterious death. Rose even claims that no other writer has been
hystericised as much by the male literacy world as Sylvia Plath. She became victim of the
pathological romanticisation of her art and death which was made into a good story for
popular culture and the growing anxieties concerning young women's mental health. Her
suicide made it look like that she was the “self-sacrificing artist”, the emotional and

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mystical prophetess who couldn’t fight against patriarchy (Rose, 1991). What keeps her
mythology alive today is that she has never been finished. She just started to live in the
eyes of the public after committing suicide.

The fictionalisation of Plath is also a reflection of our culture. Who and what has
been the mad and emotionally wrecked female artist turned into? Was her suicide a
backlash for her identity and her art? As I mentioned in the introduction, the biographical
reading of any kind of artist’s work is a limited and biased type of looking at the artist and
the work as well. Art can be pathological, but it should not limit the value of it.
Nevertheless, after the essays of Roland Barthes it is known that art and artist are separated
by the audience, the dead author remains silent while the work of art is reinterpreted and re-
evaluated over and over. The culture reflects back on the text, in this sense the language
(meaning of the text) begins to live outside the discourse of the original intention, and
without the identity of the author (Barthes, The Dead Author, 1967). Barthes revolutionary
idea was that that reading the text from the point of view of the writer is a biased
interpretation for the reason that one only seeks explanation for the meaning from the
identity of the author.

Reading Sylvia Plath without her identity is an experimentation for reducing the
stereotype of the mad female artist. Nevertheless, Plath lives inside the text, her sexual
body was the main question of her writing. The problem of femininity versus wholeness
and feminism versus victimisation can be depicted in her writings as a kind of inside
argument in the poetess’s head. The feminine body and the feminine language (l’ écriture
feminine) of Plath plays a great part in her myth (Rose, 1991). The French philosopher,
Cixous claims that a woman who attempts to write has to identify with the male organ or
create her own language, la différence (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, 1976). If the
hypothesis is that Plath’s madness which is feminized, is a part of her language can we state
that her “madness” or “pathology” was only the creation of patriarchy, the early criticism
which did not recognise the feminine language? The poems such as Lady Lazarus, Edge or
Daddy cannot be looked at as only feminine poems, these are the clear evidence of

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victimisation of women, and regardless it was Plath herself in the poem or a fictive narrator.
Sylvia Plath’s myth is the story of many other women who are facing the difficulty of
writing by the gendered language. The feminist critics of Plath study her as a female poet
who wrote about her womanliness. It seems like Plath wanted to escape from the “violated
little girl” role but over and over she faced with the limits of her life and in the language/
text as a woman. Alvarez, who knew personally Sylvia Plath claims in The Savage God: A
Study of Suicide that Sylvia Plath’s suicide was an escape from the box which her poetry
put her into (Alvarez, 1990). However poetry writing can be an escape from not going mad
(Rose, 1991). Even though, the opposite interpretation of Plath and the question of writing,
Alvarez’s and Rose’s books resonance to each other: Sylvia Plath was a victim of the
language of men and the patriarchal social structure turned her into a pathological poetess.
Rose states that only one thing is more dangerous than the control over women’s body and
that is the control over the mind – which kills women (Rose, 1991).

Sylvia Plath is a dead author in the sense of the poststructuralist analysis, but she is
an existing created textual person. Nevertheless, one should not forget that Plath was well-
known for her confessional type of writing. Even though the identity of the author can be
separated by the text, Sylvia Plath is the one with whom we identify her writing. It played a
huge role in her afterlife that Ted Hughes, her former husband was the one who published
posthumously Plath (and decided which texts can be published), and reflected critically to
her. Hughes used intertextuality in the poems which he wrote after Plath. He became the
main controller of Sylvia Plath in her life and after her death. Not only Sylvia Plath, as an
existing person was under the influence of Ted Hughes (symbolically the patriarchal
control) but her textual identity.

Female artists such as Plath have fought a battle with writing in a male dominated
literacy world and with the phallic language. In writing one acts from the identity, while
simultaneously the text begins to live independently. Some scholars state that the act of
writing is harder for women because finding the identity from which one's write is harder as
well (Rose, 1991). In The Laugh of the Medusa Cixous requests women to write, but write

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bravely, write as women must write (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, 1976). She claims
that the secrecy of women writing is the same kind of “guilty” activity as secretly
masturbating. Cixous speaks with the same kind of about the act of pouring the soul into
the text as Sylvia Plath did. Cixous writes the performance of writing feminine is a parallel
activity with giving voice to the female soul, the most mysterious part of one’s, the psyche
(Moi, 1985). However the feminine way of writing is only applies to the identity of the
textual person and Cixous states that some men can practise this style of writing; it is
mostly used and studied in women writers. The feminine writing is undefinable according
to Cixous, she claims that she is not a theorist therefore the l’écriture feminine is not a part
of a theoretical work. Therefore to define the textual Sylvia Plath, a practitioner of the
feminine writing style is impossible. Paradoxically the question of self-definition was
haunting her in her whole life. L’écriture feminine allowed her to write freely but in the
broader sense it cannot be interpreted for the whole discourse which was influenced by the
patriarchal construct. I do believe that only with a whole new perspective which does not
deconstruct the way we used to do, Sylvia Plath as a myth and as a woman (both textual
and historical) can be revealed. In discoursing Plath the interpretation of her writing style is
essential, while the clarification of feminine writing is impossible her mythical personality
cannot be deconstructed perfectly. The definition of her identity was a question of her as
well, in her early ages she tried to understand herself by picking up “poetic identities of
characters who commit suicide, adultery, or get murdered” (Plath S. K., 2002), with whom
she can identify. Latter she became that kind of identifiable person historically and textually
for many which was a result of combining the clear emotional content of her character with
the mythological, transcendent self (Banita, 2007) which she liked to use in her poetry.

The identity of Plath which we obtain from the reader’s eyes is an imaginary
woman who rather transcended herself than being only a woman and facing limits in real
life and in the textual world. For deconstructing the myth of Sylvia Plath not only her
written language should be looked at where her identity could be hidden from the eyes, but
the visual iconicity of her. What Banita argues is that Sylvia Plath was not a famous poet in
her life therefore the link between her work of art and her real person was not connected.

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All of her photographs show a young, smiling woman having the body of the currently
idolized female body type (Banita, 2007). She is perceived as a student, a Marilyn Monroe-
blond woman on the beach, a wife, a mother with her two children, but never the artist or
the mad woman. Banita recalls Susan Sontag’s essay, On Photography by referring to the
historical context of any kind of photography which she calls them more authentic than any
kind of autobiographical work because they are pieces from the reality, visual
“quotations” (Banita, 2007). In this sense, the photos of Sylvia Plath deconstruct the myth
of her own. She is just an American housewife, a mother of two, a young woman as any
others; she is as ordinary as anybody in the pictures. But if we rely truly on the visual
iconicity of her, can we see her as an artist? Can we depict Plath working, typing
hysterically a poem as we see Camus smoking a cigarette and drinking strong coffee?
According to the pictures Bukowski represents the stereotype of the self-destructive artist
with cigar in his hands and drinking whisky like water. But does Plath look like one? She is
only a smiling woman, who only once turned about to be not that happy. Sylvia Plath was
twenty when she tried to commit suicide, and 170 newspapers around the United States
reported her disappearance before it had happened (When Sylvia Plath Disappeared, 2012).
As I referred to, photographs are real pieces of life, but they can be also designed (now
completely transformed). Looking at the physical self of Plath she loses all of her mythical-
artistic magic which the textual self-mythology gave to her. Nevertheless, she had the face
and the voice, in some recording reading her poems, which we link the work of her. When
she read to poems she became the reader and the interpreter as well. Her voice is sharp, full
of anger and impulsive emotional content. Could somebody else ever read a Sylvia Plath
text with just authenticity as her?

As Barthes put it, the future of the text is in our hands, he claims that after studying
the author and its effect on the text, the time should come where the readership is examined
in the content analysis. As well, as the audience is always part of the discourse, the bigger
picture of the mad female artist. The next chapter shall tell the story of the Sylvia Plath
Reader who are discoursing her and remain just as a myth as Plath herself.


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4.2. Sylvia Plath’s Readership: Discoursing the “Neurotic Sad Girls” and
Sylvia Plath as a Suicide Icon

“OK to like Plath minus the obsession with death.” (Rea, 2003)

Anybody who holds a Sylvia Plath book in his/her hand and starts to read it, enters
to the discourse of Sylvia Plath and her readership. A great part of looking at Plath as the
stereotype of “mad female artist” is the way readers have participated in discoursing her; as
well they have been interpreted by the critics. Though, no reader is the same and has the
similar reading experiences, the myth binds them to a specific reading practice. The Plath-
readers have established a mass. The Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard studied the mass
(public) in the 19th century in his essay The Present Age. At that time the mass media and
just started to appear with the beginning of industrialisation, but its manipulative effect
grabbed the interest of many thinkers. His revolutionary idea was that the mass, created by
the media which consists “unreal individuals” and an abstraction of acting together while
not being a wholly unite (Kierkegaard, 1962). He argues that the participants of the mass
do not have any kind of shared attribute, only being part of the abstract public. While
“individuals are nothing” without the public, but with it they become a collectively
together. The people who are in the mass are never getting physically unite, but the body of
the mass makes them bigger than they would ever be as individuals because of the
abstraction of it (Kierkegaard, 1962). This kind of non-defined togetherness makes Sylvia
Plath a living myth for many generations after her death. Readers have power without being
conscious in their act of reading practices. Constructing an interpretation of a text does
involve the historical reading process of that particular text, as well as the author. Today it
became growlingly popular that after a well-known and revolutionary thinker books are
being published about her/his readership, as some kind of participators of an organisation or
members of a secret society. This is how the book Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of

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Women Readers could be written by Janet Badia, published in 2011 which will be the main
source of this chapter.

Badia introduces the question of the Plath-reader with a “long established’ discourse
about women and reading. She relies on Kate Flint’s book, The Woman Reader who has
discoursed the reading women and the connection with their health. Badia gives an
example from Flint’s book that in diagnosing hysteria the wrong way of reading was a valid
argument, while the disorder was believed to be cured by the right reading practices. Since
the 18th century women who read have been portrayed in paintings with a “melancholic
state of mind” and have been romantized by their silence. Reading women were considered
dangerous just as much as the educated women (Badia, 2011). Even, women who read as a
religious act are the most disturbing part of the discourse. Badia admits that she is one of
those who needed Plath’s writing in a “daily dose”. In this analogy Plath’s writing is the
“medication” for many, who have been called the “pathological readers” (Badia, 2011). As
mentioned, the readers represent a great part of the Plath-myth, they have been part of the
discourse of the unhealthy reading practices of women. For many critics, Badia argue the
Plath-readers are only able to see and interpret Sylvia Plath by her mental illness and her
gender. Badia mentions several literacy critics who have thought that the young female
readers of the suicidal confessional poets (Plath, Sexton) are the wrong kind of audience for
such writers. Poets lose their ‘highbrow’ title by being read of a usually looked down young
women who are the main consumers of popular culture. Badia claims that since the 1970s
the fears and anxieties concerning the Plath-cult among young women have entered in the
discourse the pathological female readers (Badia, 2011). Some decades ago Gilbert tried to
find the essence of the mythical connection between Plath and her readership in an essay.
She, as a “Plath-addict” questions that Sylvia Plath’s popularity among young women can
have a more deeper link than just a writer-reader connection since she had “an identifiable
set of forces which nudge the lives and works of women like Plath into certain apparently
mythical (archetypical) patterns” (Gilbert, 1978). There is nothing more crucial part of the
Sylvia Plath Reader than merely that as a mass they have power over the interpretation.
While reading the text the reader can become the “mad female artist”, communicated by

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Sylvia Plath. Badia claims that the Hugheses (Frida and Ted) have been extremely
concerned about the readership of Plath which caused a conscious managing of her
publications (Badia, 2011). The readers have been almost as much victimized as Plath
herself. She refers back to the 1970s feminist movement which triggered the popularity of
Plath among young women who no longer see Sylvia Plath as a poet but as a “life-
sustaining vibration” (Badia, 2011). Later, she connects the Plath-consumption practice of
young females to the food consumption/hunger of women which is as well something to be
always controlled by the men. Not at least, the media likes to use the stereotypical Plath-
reader when it comes to portraying an intellectual, rebellious feminist adolescent girl. A
teenager holding in her hands a Plath-book is always a great reference to her personality
type. Only by carrying the books of an iconic suicide poet gives the interpretation of the
usually an outsider girl who can be easily established by such reference. In her book Badia
blames the media who have accepted the discourse of the uncritical, pathological Plath-
reader teenage girl.

A part of how Plath has been established as a famous “mad poetess” is the myth of
readers which binds the author and readership with the help of the metalanguage. The
metalanguage is for Roland Barthes the symbolic language which does not have the logic
of the “real language” (Barthes, Critical Essays, 1972) and can exist by itself when the
logical, objective langue which is to be destroyed. He argues later in his essay, Authors and
Writers that we are still missing the “sociology of language” (Barthes, Critical Essays,
1972), the deep down power relations between the readers (interpreters) and writers
(narrator). Without getting into the field of literacy criticism and discoursing literature I
would like to highlight the importance of reading Sylvia Plath from the point of view of a
symbolic meaning. The semiotics of reader and Plath can be interpreted in many ways. In
my interpretation Sylvia Plath and the connection between the myth of the readership can
be symbolical (the hidden metalanguage which bonds a kind of audience to the text), iconic
(Sylvia Plath is referred many times as a “suicide icon” or “mad poet icon” which both are
true, autobiographical elements make her one although its rather how she has benne
perceived, make her stand for a specific iconic figure which existed before her being that

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one), and indexical (her suicide and the act of writing poems directly connects Sylvia Plath
to the “mad female artist” as an indexical sign). The Saussurean sign system gives an
explanation on why the myth can be so strong, and still valid to the Sylvia Plath reader.
Sylvia Plath as a cultural production can be both a signifier (to the pathological women
readers), and a signified (to the mad female artist).

The several layers of the Plath-myth leads us to the poststructuralist Jacques Derrida
who thought that the structuralist sign system is too simple to be applied to the realm of
language and how the human mind perceives reality, in fact the concept, sign should be
rejected (Derrida, 1978). Discourses as such are more complex and are acentric therefore a
centre cannot be found in process of interpretation. He claims that historically Western
cultures are to be blamed on that. We are trying to find meaning be searching the centre
point of everything. His new, deconstructionist theory allows us to think about la différance
in semiotics as well which does not require the origin (Guillemette & Cossette, 2006), there
are infinite number of connections in the sign system. Therefore in the discourse of Sylvia
Plath and her readership there are no clear points in which the mythology has begun. The
Plath-myth is well hidden in the symbolic language of her, the historical discourse of
women and reading, women and writing and women and madness. This gives the meaning
on how Plath has been read, and how act of reading her has been perceived. If the male-
dominated literacy world found her too pathological for “high art”, and she gained
popularity among seemingly similar young females who are usually the popular culture
consumers. The question is rather not why Plath has been so popular among teenage girls
and young female adults in every generation since she committed suicide but rather why
does it matter who reads her and how. As Arielle Greenberg and Becca Klaver in a
discussion are trying to map the girls’ culture surrounded by her, Greenberg notes ‘she is a
girl poet’. (Klaver, Arielle Greenberg and Becca, 2009). And this is a much more dominant
argument than it first seems since a girl poet, even a mad girl poet could be as popular as
any kind of male artist.

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 I titled my thesis as “Sisters of Sylvia Plath” which consciously contains a double
meaning in itself – a poststructuralist, acentred sign system. Sylvia Plath of course, hadn’t
had a sister, only a brother. The “sisters” refer to a kind of solidarity, sisterhood who share
the same experiences, personality type without trying to connect. Sisters of Plath can be the
young female artists who have gone through the double measures on being a female artist
and dealing with madness as a form of art in the patriarchal order. While the Plath-readers
are being connected in the symbolic or mythological level where they share the similarities
with Plath, and with themselves. That of course does not mean that a Plath-reader must be a
young woman with “pathological” reading practices and obsession of the suicide of her.
The meaning is discourse by itself (Derrida, 1978), therefore the interpretation of Sylvia
Plath and her readership can be many. The scenario in which she is set is historical,
political, and mythological. It stands on the ground a culture which pathologized her, as a
mad female artist. In a way, Plath has been created before she even existed or committed
suicide. Derrida claims in the act of writing one must accept that meaning precedes it,
writing is inaugural (Derrida, 1978). Even if Plath would not write such good literature, her
myth would be there. It was not Plath’s metalanguage, or her existence but the timing of her
communication. As she clearly saw in her young age as well:

“Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries
smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the
present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are
gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.” (Plath S. K., 2002)

In the discourse of Sylvia Plath – as a cultural symbol –, and her female readership
the past, present and the future constitute together the myth. I attempt to analyse the
discourse where language, text, author, audience and timing are together meaning which I
called the communication of the mad female artist.

In my last subchapter I will focus on the Plath readers further on, but not how they
constitute as a mass/myth, rather how they have been perceived in popular culture. On the
other hand, I would like to extend the discourse of Sylvia Plath as a mad girl poet, and look

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into the importance of girls’ culture in regarding the constructed feminized madness as
rebelling against patriarchy.

4.3. Who Has to Die? – Teenage Girl Culture Aesthetics and the
Representation of Sylvia Plath in Popular Culture

The main part of this chapter which relies on is the four-line long song lyrics
from the punk girl band Bikini Kill from 1996. In the 1990s in the United States of America
a semi-radical feminist movement started to appear which made the term “girl gang” a
worldwide used definition for bands with feminist young-girls-only members. The Riot
Grrl area played a huge role in discoursing teenage girls popular culture and in the
reinterpretation of Sylvia Plath and the way she became a cultural product, an icon of
feminist girl poets. For understanding the importance of Sylvia Plath in the 1990s girls’
culture, the communication and approach of this specific girl movement is needed.

The Riot Grrl movement was part of the third feminist movement of the 1990s in
the United States which started with as a girl revolution (Shrodes, 2012). The social
movement contained punk rock girl bands, do it yourself (DIY) aesthetics, and zines,
slogans, and several products which are living their second revolution in today’s girls
culture. One of the most important girl gang is the Bikini Kill which released its last album,
the Reject All American in 1996 with the hit Bloody Ice Cream. The punk rock band had
several songs and lyrics which main communication approach can be interpreted as creating
a space for girls and giving power and the opportunity of self-definition in the culture
which usually oppresses girls and rather teach them how to be sick (Pipher, 1994). I
introduced the 1990s mainstream girl-poising culture in the previous chapters of this thesis
by showing how madness starts to constitute in the early ages of a girl/woman. Parallel
with the Ophelia-effect, the culture of self-conscious girls started to rise, who have created
their own subculture, they own media products, icons and rebelled against the norms of the

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traditional system. It is important to see how Sylvia Plath as the victimized girl with Electra
complex became a role model of the movement of the girls who she might would have been
a part of if she lived several decades later. The Reject All American album contains the song
of the most important evidence how Sylvia Plath has been seen as a part of the popular
girls’ culture in the Riot Grrrl area. This movement can be interpreted as an extreme
reaction of the victimization of young girls and women who are just trying to escape from
the oppression of patriarchy. Madness and art are both forms of escapism which feminine
notion is undeniable. The art of teenage girls, the DIY products are part of the cultural
production which have been looked down on from the male-dominated “serious high art”
category. As many essays claim, the importance of Sylvia Plath for the teenage girls lies in
that she can be seen as part of the highbrow art while remaining simultaneously an icon of
young female artist (Klaver, Arielle Greenberg and Becca, 2009). What Janet Badia
discovers in her book is the fact Sylvia Plath represents a duality, and seemingly binary
opposition that she could be respected by the literacy critics and still be a part and valuable
member of popular teenage girl literature.

One of the most famous anecdote about Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain’s ex love and
singer that in her first reading audition at the age eleven at Disney she read a Sylvia Plath
poem with which Disney company wasn’t so satisfied (Selby, 2014). This was in 1975, and
the cultural anxiety concerning what girls like is still relevant. The story tells us that we
don’t want young girls to read and idolise a famous and talented poetess like Sylvia Plath.
On the other hand, it is acceptable to do the same with male artists, and never mind that she
wrote about the experiences and feelings which a young girl could relate more easily.
Courtney Love was one of those rebellious girls who are doing and desiring what they want
not what society wants them to like. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the popular
media like to use the rebellious interpretation of a teenage girl by relying on Sylvia Plath as
a feminist icon of young girls. One of the most notable moments was in the movie Not
Another Teen Movie (2001) which the title already suggests that it wants to go against the
mainstream. In the teen movie the main character, Janey says to her brother: “I don’t
conform to typical high school norms. I read Sylvia Plath, listen to Bikini Kill and eat tofu.

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I am a unique rebel.” (Gallen, 2001). Her father holds on the stereotype, she calls her
daughter a “rub muncher” which the Urban Dictionary interprets as “One who gives oral
sex to women, who usually is a lesbian. (…) Also, in men’s opinions, the 2nd best thing that
has ever happened to the world, behind bisexuals” (Urban Dictionary, 2003).

Only this line can interpret someone’s personality, and this only happens in the third
minute of the one and a half hour long film. Regardless of the family anxieties over Janey’s
sexuality, she is a deviant, an outsider not just in her family but in the most important social
environment of her age, in high school. The movie is set in the United States in the
millennium which might be a bit late for the Riot Grrrl area which makes Janey an absolute
deviant at her age group. The Rebel Girl song by the Bikini Kill is playing on the
background as she paints in one of her classes. The movie shows an ironic picture of gender
and age group stereotypes where the popular girls are oversexualised and stupid whom
every guy want, and the outsider is an intellectual but pretty girl. The same storyline can be
detected in the movie, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) featuring Heath Ledger and Julia
Stiles. Kat, played by Stiles shares the same kind of attributes as Janey. The movie starts
with the camera angle showing Kat who reads The Bell Jar in her room, the scene is set in a
ways that the audience can recognise the book in Kat’s hand (Badia, 2011). Kat is
intellectual, pretty but not pretty enough to be the “cool girl”, she clearly states (opposite to
her younger sister) that she is not interested in boys. In both of movie there is a younger
sibling of the Plath-reader who cannot start his/her puberty age (dating, having sex) by the
father’s order until the older girl who is clearly not interested in such things does not do the
same. Although, in both of the movies’ end the rebellious girls get the nice guy which
results a pattern change in the behaviour. As, with a help of a boyfriend the rebellious
(being deviant) attitudes and the intellectual aspect of the teenage girl could vanish. Several
other references can be seen in teenage girl culture about Sylvia Plath, but mostly American
produced movies feature her because of her relevance in the United States. The common
point in these references is that they interpret Sylvia Plath and her cultural relevance the
same way. The cultural criticism of the readers started in the 1970s, and entered into the
word of popular culture with the help of Woody Allen. In the movie Annie Hall (1977) the

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intellectual middle-aged man, Alvy Singer played by Woody Allen criticizes Annie for
having the book, Ariel in her room. Woody Allen embodies the patriarchal control over the
reading practices of Sylvia Plath, by referring to the pathological reading practices that
Sylvia Plath’s death “(…) was misinterpreted as romantic by college girl
mentality.” (Allen, 1977). At the same time this line can be interpreted ironically – for the
reason of the ironic and sarcastic nature of the Woody Allen movies. Woody Allen shows
both of the sides of the stories. On the other hand, the narrator is a male who interprets the
phenomena of young female’s connection towards Plath. Let the relationship be told by the
girls as well. Now, I would like to go back to the band, Bikini Kill who has produced a song
which became the ars poetica of an age group. It could have been relevant in the 1970s, as
it is still significant in the discoursing Sylvia Plath’ cult in today’s popular culture.

“The Sylvia Plath story is told to girls who write

They want us to think that to be a girl poet means you have to die.

Who is it that told me all girls who write must suicide?

I've another good one for you, we are turning cursive letters into Knives.”

The girls who write are like Sylvia Plath, at least this is the narrative which is told
to them. The second line (“They want us to think that to be a girl poet means you have to
die.”) shows how teenage girls are controlled by the myth of the suicidal mad artist
stereotype which Kaufman proved in his study (Kaufman, The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental
Illness in Eminent Creative Writers, 2001). In the third line the narrator/singer questions the
social construction (patriarchy) which first of all, makes girls sick as I demonstrated and on
the other hand makes them believe that the only way to be successful as a young girl poet is
to go mad or kill themselves. The similar “live fast, die young” narrative became popular
used slogan interpreted for singers who are going mad/dying for the “sake of art”. This is
called the 27 Club which contains many artists who died at the age of 27, i.a. Amy
Winehouse, Janis Joplin. The last line of the Bloody Ice Cream suggest an alternative
options for the girls (who write) – “we are turning cursive letters into Knives”. This is the

!47
sentence which can be interpreted as the motto of the Riot Grrrl area – it suggests that the
girls are going to fight back. Whether it is made with creating their own culture (DYI, girl
gangs, zines, and girl poets) or with a real social revolution which can change the way we
think about teenage girl culture or the connection between women and madness. I have
found the lyrics of the Bikini Kill song extremely important and useful for my thesis as I
was searching for references in teenage girl culture about Sylvia Plath. The song reveals the
important notion of girls’ culture which I mentioned in my Introduction, and I would like to
frame my work to connect the end with the beginning. The society we live in teaches
teenage girls that artists like Sylvia Plath are wrong examples of how somebody should
relate to her gender, her own experiences with madness and patriarchy as a social construct.
On the other hand in the new media age of the twenty-first century everyone can publish
everywhere, and age groups like teenage girls can easily find each other in the social media
sites and forums and share the experiences which they have. Regarding to Sylvia Plath –
she is as popular among young females as she was in each generation since she died.

The suicide of her should not control the way we look at her as a woman, an artist
and a cultural product, and her importance in teenage popular culture. However it can help
if social scientists are ready to discover the difficulties and opportunities which a teenage
girl (like Sylvia Plath was some decades ago) could face. I sincerely hope that cultural
studies regarding madness will lead in the near future to the quite new field of girls’ culture.

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5. Conclusion

5.1. An Attempt on Re-discoursing Women and Madness

Albert Camus’s book, The Myth of Sisyphus is considered one of the most
famous philosophical works on suicide. Written by a man, such forms of madness or
questions on the meaning of life are acceptable and even, healthy for our culture. I was 18
years old when I had to read Camus’s work for my literature class in high school. We had to
read dozens of Hungarian and international artists, of course, all men, who committed
suicide. The male/masculine madness was always part of the art, and it was always the
suffering which artists just do. I did not hear about female artists who were a victim of their
own, feminized madness such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman. Nevertheless, as I discovered my passion towards literature, writing and feminism
I could not avoid the discourse of the mad woman. One of the fist sources I read for my
thesis was the well-known Women and Madness book by Phyllis Chesler who also
mentions Sylvia Plath several times as one of the most famous example for being
victimized. I always saw Plath as a female poet whose importance has been shaped by the
last act she did – killed herself.

I was wondering – why Sylvia Plath? Why has been she the stereotype of
mad female artist? Probably it is the mythic secrecy of her suicide, that we will never know
how she spent her last two years thanks to Ted Hughes. Maybe it was the timing, the age of
phytopathology and feminism and the fact that she was only thirty years old. The question
which I wanted to study in my thesis was that madness seems to become so important in
female artists’ work that it reinterprets her work and life while we never think the same
about men. The double standards which we have for women when it comes to art and
madness are probably as long as humankind. I studied the historical process when first only
male artists had the right to shape the discourse on female madness (the female malady),
then I got closer to the topic of Sylvia Plath and the importance of being a woman. I had

!49
mentioned several examples when women were victimized by the patriarchal social order.
When women tried to formulate their own thoughts and feelings on their own madness it
became suddenly just a failed attempt which resulted the over-glamorising and -feminising
the real problems. Sylvia Plath was a great person to work with. She did not wanted to fail
under the control over patriarchy which embodied in the male-dominated literacy world,
her Daddy chasing her as a nightmare, or the cheater husband. As I studied closely the
discourse of the feminized madness it became clear that she was certainly living her own
myth, and I am sure that without the tragedy of her, the current discourse of women and
madness would not be the same. The question is rather that how long we want to live in the
shadows of her suicide?

In the American Classic Slam Poetry competition organised in 2012 a young

American girl, Alyssa Paul performed the poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath, and after it shared
his poem titled also Daddy with the audience. Plath and the poem became alive with a
performance of the young woman, similar to her who personalised the poet and used her to
communicate her own feeling for her father. Sylvia Plath is not just idealised, but she is a
creative force for many. Another example from the new media where Sylvia Plath gained
importance in today’s culture is the writer, John Green who is running a literacy educational
channel, the Crush Course on YouTube. He made a video about the poetry of Plath, which
highlighted her talent not the tragic death of a female poet. The video starts with a
humorous ironic sentence: “Mr. Green, Mr. Green, Nah, I’ve heard that she is like the
patron saint of sad teenage girls.” In fact Green (who himself also suffers from a form of
mental illness, OCD) was focusing on mentioning her suicide, and funnily saying the Open
Letter to Suicide which responsible for many wonderful non-published books of Plath. John
Green, as a male writer is able to show how Sylvia Plath became an iconic figure of teenage
girls at the same time specifically concentrating on her talent, not on the romantic nature of
her death. The male point of view gives a distance to the audience and suddenly we are not
seeing Plath as the “mad female artist”. Sadly, this is the interpretation which apparently
just the male gaze can give to her, a man knows better how women see female artists and
why do they relate to her easily.

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 In my thesis I wanted to show my enthusiasm over the re-discoursing not just Sylvia
Plath’s cultural memory but the way on which we interpret the female form of madness.
Only knowing the past can be make sense on the present, and critically approach the future.
Madness is not good or bad, but it certainly makes women look worse in the process of
cultural evaluation – see: Mad, Bad, Sad by Lisa Appignanesi. Women should not be
controlled and feel controlled, but in fact the pathologization and medicalization of the
female body is an ongoing process of the twenty-first century (Miranda R. Waggoner,
2010). On the other side of the narrative, women’s body experiences are more validated in
the medical studies than ever (Sanghani, 2016). Pathology is not always madness, but
madness is always pathology, and if a woman has a greater chance to experience pathology
then it is also leads to the feminized notion of madness.

5.2. Drawing the Future: Researches in the Field of Gender Studies, Art and

Media Studies

When I the topic of my thesis was taking shape and I started to research on the field
I did it with the enthusiasm that this topic will be my future research topic (which is a very
broad area) in my next major, MA of Gender Studies. Nevertheless, writing my Bachelor
thesis I tried to be as specific in the field as possible. The difficulties of my study field arise
from the fact that it is more an interdisciplinary field which involves studies from medical
studies, psychopathology, psychology, art, especially literacy criticisms, linguistics,
philosophy, media studies and basic knowledges about gender studies. These were
advantages as well, since I could discover my passion toward several other sub-topics.
Nevertheless, biases could arise from the lack of concrete analyses from the field. My
Bachelor thesis was an opportunity for getting engaged in my wished research area which
is seems a very up-to-date topic concerning the current studies on women’s mental health
and the feminist engagement on the liberation of female artists over control of the madness
stigmas, and finding the female (mad) geniuses. My Communication and Media Studies
helped me to be open-minded for the future. The discourse of women and madness is
historically broad, but not closed for new approaches, especially when it comes to the

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consumer practices of teenage girls. I am grateful for having been taught to critical thinking
which was essential in my thesis writing.

For last, I would like to highlight the principles of feminist epistemology, which
relies on the interpretivism and the (female) experience-based study in which subjectivity is
crucial, and was also for me, as a young woman, a poet, and an imaginary Sister of Sylvia
Plath.

5.3. Writing It: A Young Female Artist Point of View

When I first met the works of Sylvia Plath I was nineteen years old, and I
immediately became the stereotypical Plath-addict. As the above mentioned several
scholars wrote about it, I felt also a strange addiction to her writings, especially to her
poetry. Later I discovered that I was part of a discourse where thousands of young girls like
me shared the admiration towards a poet who was not much older than I am when she died.

Sylvia Plath is possibly a part of a “romantized college girl mentality”, but as I was
in the process of my thesis writing, I got to the conclusion that it is not a bad and
“misinterpreted” act of that she is liked and read mostly by young women and teenage girls.
In fact, I am certain that Sylvia Plath readers want nothing more than to validate her work
and her feelings, just as much as their own. Plath, as a cultural product is like a guide to any
young female artist who can relate to any kind of forms of madness. Finally I understood
her effect on my age group when I discovered the song of Bikini Kill which I chose to
analyse. No other songs could explain (certainly there are many which are mentioning in
some form Sylvia Plath) how she works as a reference point for young females, especially
poets. Kaufman’s study on the Sylvia Plath Effect made the hypothesis scientifically valid
and reliable which the Bikini Kill defined in an art product.

Madness is something which has no clear set boundaries, and definitely

there is a fine line between mental disorders and the madness of the mind in a philosophical

!52
sense. From the many sources I used I could discover how these two are interdependent and
interrelated, nevertheless applied for women more recently than for men. I consider myself
part of the discourse of the Plath readers, and part of mass of females who want to write. In
the new media there is an enormous amount of opportunities for teenagers to find each
other and make art together. Nevertheless, there is a looked-down attitude towards the
negative feelings of teenagers, especially girls which is connected to the cultural anxieties
of their consumption and content-generating practices (such as writing and blogging). Girls,
from a very early age are more encouraged for DIY products than boys, on the other hand
because of these stereotypical practices (diary writing, hand crafting, writing, painting, and
drawing) it is more looked down when a girl does them. When men are entering into the
picture of doing such things, suddenly these practices became art.

I discovered from my own experiences that wanting to be an artist is harder for

females, usually women are artistic but men are considered the artists. Even if we can have
the same opportunities, the attitudes towards a boy/man and a girl/woman who writes is
never the same. Just as the male gaze on the feminized madness or women who are part of
the discourse.

!53
Appendix B – References and Works Cited

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Alvarez, A. (1990). The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. London: Bloomsbury.
Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin. (1999). The Complete Poems. New York: Mariner Books.
Appignanesi, L. (2009). Mad, Bad And Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors
from 1800 to the Present. Virago.
Badia, J. (2011). Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers. Massachusetts:
University of Massachusetts Press.
Banita, G. (2007). "The Same, Identical Woman": Sylvia Plath in the Media. The Journal of
the Midwest Modern Language Association, 38-60.
Barthes, R. (1967). The Dead Author. Aspen.
Barthes, R. (1972). Critical Essays. USA: Northwestern Univerity Press.
Beauvoir, S. d. (1949). The Second Sex. Vintage.
Bloom, S. F. (2004). "The Mad Scene: Enter Ophelia!": O'Neill's Use of the Delayed
Entrance in "Long Day's Journey. The Eugene O'Neill Review, pp. 226-238.
Brumberg, J. J. (1988). Fasting Girls: The Emerge of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern
Disease. USA: Harvard University Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York.
Chesler, P. (1974). Women and Madness. London: Allen Lane.
Cixous, H. (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs, 875-893.
Cixous, H. (2009). Hyperdream. Cambridge: Polity.
Cross, S. (2010). Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Reprentation. New
York: Palgrave.
Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. USA: Chicago University Press.
Dobbs, J. (1977). 'Viciousness in the Kitchen': Sylvia Plath's Domestic Poetry. Modern
Language Studies, p11-25.
Driscoll, C. (2008). Girls Today: Girls, Girl Culture and Girl Studies. Berghahn Journals,
13–32.

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Dykewomon, E. (1988/89). Notes for a Magazine.
ed: Sally Bayley, T. B. (2011). Representing Sylvia Plath. USA: Cambridge University
Press.
Farady, M. (2010). The Girl-Crisis Movement: Evaluating the Foundation. General
Psychology, 44-55.
Foucault, M. (1988). Madness and Civilization. USA: Vintage.
Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. USA: Penguin.
Gallen, J. (Director). (2001). Not Another Teen Movie [Motion Picture].
Gender & Gender Identity. (2014). Retrieved from Planned Parenthood: https://
www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/sexual-orientation-gender/gender-gender-identity
Gilbert, S. M. (1978). "A Fine, White Flying Myth": Confessions of a Plath Addict. The
Massachusetts Review, 585-603.
Gilman, C. P. (1892). The Yellow Wallpaper.
Goldin, C. D. (1999). The Role of World War II in the Rise of Women's Employment. The
American Economic Review, 741-756.
Guillemette, L., & Cossette, J. (2006). Deconstruction and Différance. Retrieved from
Theortic Semiotic on the Web: http://www.signosemio.com/derrida/deconstruction-
and-differance.asp
Heidensohn. (1985). Women and Crime . London: Macmillian.
James C. Kaufman, John Baer. (2002). Bask in Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry,
and Women. Review of General Psychology, 271–286.
Kaufman, J. C. (2001). The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers.
The Journal of Creative Behavior , 37-50.
Kaysen, S. (1994). Girl, Interrputed. New York: Vintage .
Kierkegaard, S. (1962). The Present Age. United States of America: Harper & Row .
Klaver, Arielle Greenberg and Becca. (2009). Mad Girls’ Love Songs: Two Women Poets—
a Professor and Graduate Student—Discuss Sylvia Plath, Angst, and the Poetics of
Female Adolescence. Project Muse, 179-207.

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Meyer, M. D., Wood, M. M., & Fallah, A. M. (2011). Gender, Media, and Madness:
Reading a Rhetoric of Women in Crisis Through Foucauldian Theory. Review of
Communication.
Milestone, K. (2011). Gender and Popular Culture.
Miquel-Baldellou, M. (2008). Words of Madness / Female Worlds:Hysteria as Intertextual
Discourse of Women’s Deviance in Jane Eyre. Cynos.
Miranda R. Waggoner, C. D. (2010). Gender and Medicalization. Sociologists for Women in
Society Fact Sheet.
Moi, T. (1985). Sexual/Textural Politics: Feminist Literacy Theory. London: Routledge.
Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16.3 , 6/18.
Oldis, K. O. ( 1986). Young Adult Literature: Anorexia Nervosa: The More It Grows, the
More It Starves. The English Journal, 84-88.
Owen, R. J. (2007). Voicing the Drowned Girl: Poems by Hilde Domin, Ulla Hahn, Sarah
Kirsch, and Barbara Köhler. The Modern Language Review, pp. 781-792.
Pipher, M. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. USA: Putnam
Adult.
Plath, S. (1992). The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. New York: HarperCollins Publishers
Inc.
Plath, S. (1999). Letters Home. USA: Faber & Faber.
Plath, S. K. (2002). The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Anchor Books.
Rea, A. (2003). Reclaiming Plath. Readerville Journal, 38-43.
Romanska, M. (2005). Ontology and Eroticism: The Two Bodies of Ophelia. Women's
Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, 485-513.
Rose, J. (1991). The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard University Press .
Sanghani, R. (2016, February 26.02.2016). Period pain can feel 'as bad as a heart attack'.
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attack-so-why-is-there-a/

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Selby, J. (2014, July 8). Happy 50th birthday, Courtney Love. And thank you for this - the
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and-thank-you-for-this-the-most-awkward-celebrity-interview-of-all-9592817.html
Shannonhouse, R. (2003). Out of her mind: Women Writers on Madness. Modern Library.
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https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/96647/addiecs.pdf?
sequence=1
Simon Kyaga, P. L. (2011). Creativity and mental disorder: family study. The British
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Stracuzzi, N. F., & Blum, L. M. (2004). Gender in the Prozac Nation: Popular Discourse
and Productive Femininity. Gender and Society, 269-286.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2003). Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. Palgrave MacMillan.
When Sylvia Plath Disappeared. (2012, August 22). Retrieved from Sylvia Plath Info Blog:
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Whittington-Egan, R. (1998). The life after death of Sylvia Plath: Known As: Lucas,
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Substance Dependence.
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Wurztel, E. (1994). Prozac Nation. New York: Riverhead Trade.

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Appendix C – Poems Often Referred To

Sylvia Plath: Daddy

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

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Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

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The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

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But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

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 The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

(Plath S. , The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 1992)

Sylvia Plath: Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it--

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

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A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?--

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

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To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot--

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

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As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

‘A miracle!'

That knocks me out.

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There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart--

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

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 Ash, ash--

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

(Plath S. , The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 1992)

Anne Sexton: Consorting With Angels

I was tired of being a woman,

tired of the spoons and the post,

tired of my mouth and my breasts,

tired of the cosmetics and the silks.

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There were still men who sat at my table,

circled around the bowl I offered up.

The bowl was filled with purple grapes

and the flies hovered in for the scent

and even my father came with his white bone.

But I was tired of the gender things.

Last night I had a dream

and I said to it...

'You are the answer.

You will outlive my husband and my father.'

In that dream there was a city made of chains

where Joan was put to death in man's clothes

and the nature of the angels went unexplained,

no two made in the same species,

one with a nose, one with an ear in its hand,

one chewing a star and recording its orbit,

each one like a poem obeying itself,

performing God's functions,

a people apart.

'You are the answer, '

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I said, and entered,

lying down on the gates of the city.

Then the chains were fastened around me

and I lost my common gender and my final aspect.

Adam was on the left of me

and Eve was on the right of me,

both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason.

We wove our arms together

and rode under the sun.

I was not a woman anymore,

not one thing or the other.

O daughters of Jerusalem,

the king has brought me into his chamber.

I am black and I am beautiful.

I've been opened and undressed.

I have no arms or legs.

I'm all one skin like a fish.

I'm no more a woman

than Christ was a man.

(Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, 1999)

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