Sylvia Plath is still alive. Sixty years after his suicide, one of the most famous in the history of literature (the head in the oven, the tray prepared with the children’s breakfasts, the piece of paper with the doctor’s phone number, the babysitter who arrives late…) , the bibliography around her does not stop growing, nor does her texts continue to be republished. Also in Spanish. Random House publishes a new edition of her only novel, The Glass Bell (1963), with beautiful illustrations by Sonia Pulido and an intelligent prologue by Aixa de la Cruz. A complete edition of her letters to her mother is published by the same seal, while the Tres Hermanas publishing house is publishing all of her correspondence in four volumes, of which the third has appeared this year.
Why does Plath (Boston, 1932-London, 1963) continue to fascinate us? My hypothesis: because of how well her work expresses her, and her life and death exemplify, the expectations, difficulties, doubts… of the modern woman.
Like any modern individual, Plath pursued two types of dreams: professional and romantic. For the first, she was a model: her letters show how clearly she set goals for herself – to publish, obtain a scholarship, win a prize… –, with what self-discipline and tenacity she pursued them. At the same time, he intensely desired love, sex, motherhood. And like any modern woman, she discovered that combining these two facets makes life easier for men, but penalizes women (even today, having children increases the income of fathers and decreases that of mothers).
That is the backdrop of The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel in which Plath recounts her first great success: she wins a contest, spends a month in New York… and shortly after (after a tragicomic episode of losing her virginity), Her first big failure: she is not accepted into a literary workshop. And for her, failing means condemning herself to a life like that of her mother, a self-sacrificing and depressed woman, for whom Plath feels affection and gratitude (manifested in Letters to My Mother), but also contempt and resentment (as she confides to her newspaper and it is revealed in The bell…). Hence her suicide attempt, which will land her in a psychiatric institution. The novel, somewhat disjointed, gains emotion and intensity, and inaugurates a new feminine subjectivity: critical, sober, anguished, not at all romantic. Read today, a certain misogynistic air is surprising in it: Plath paints married women with children as boring, irrelevant and childish… and single women with a professional life and/or lesbians as sad and even repulsive characters.
Having to choose between these two destinations, which is more depressing, is Plath’s drama: it runs like a red thread through her brief life as well as her work. He is jealous of men for their sexual freedom, he hates the ease with which they find women willing to dedicate their lives to them; but at times, he tries to be one of them: marry “the man I would want to be if he were a man”; joyfully accepting the role of wife and mother, creating a cozy home with “geniuses drinking gin in the kitchen” (her husband and his friends) while she prepares dinner… She describes all of this in her letters (with less frankness, that is). yes, that in his diary)… until “the colossus” (that’s what Ted Hughes calls him in a poem) appears in his life, like a meteorite. That she seems to resolve all their doubts in one fell swoop: they will have a passionate, creative, happy… and equal relationship.
It was not so. Ted found success very early, and as her height grew, Sylvia felt herself shrink… “I have a queen to win back,” she wrote in one of her most beautiful poems, after leaving him. “Is she dead, is she asleep? Where has she been, with her red lion body, her crystal wings? ”… A few months later, she died. But she has not stopped resurrecting since then, in bookstores and in the hearts and minds of those of us who read her.