“It really is a shame Koreans don’t utilize their rooftops for parties,” Anna said to me one afternoon over coffee. A few days later, an e-mail invitation arrived inviting me to the rooftop of Anna’s apartment building for drinks. There I stood, looking out over the sprawling neighborhood which connected to my university, speaking with a British English teacher.
Her story wasn’t unusual for most English teachers in Korea: she had a B.A. in English, had gotten a job in publishing out of college but quit to travel the world before her youth was spoiled.
“Who are your favorite poets?” she posed.
“Well, um, let me think,” I replied to the standard icebreaker between two English majors. “Dickinson, Shelley, Millay … erm … oh and Plath, yeah Plath. She’s great.”
Her eyes narrowed and she spoke, “Oh, Plath,” she asserted, ” — too depressing. Dark.”
I winced at her reply, “Plath? Depressing?” I thought.
We moved on to other topics and what may have been the first ever roof party in Korea ended nicely. Yet, this girl’s reaction to Plath stuck with me for a long time. It was not the first time I had mentioned Plath as one of my favorite authors, and it was not the first time people had dismissed her work as “depressing,” “gloomy,” or “manic-depressive,” none of these labels aided by her suicide via an oven at the age of 32. Many literature enthusiasts as well as pop culture at large associate Plath with angst-ridden female teens, sullen and shut away in their bedrooms from a society that doesn’t understand them.
Sylvia Plath is, however, much more than what popular culture has transformed her into. Her value lays not only in her exploration of the psychological, but also in her journals, short stories and poetry confronting issues such as sexism in society and academia, motherhood, marriage the process of writing, and the want of a fulfilling life.
Born during the Great Depression in Massachusetts, Plath began writing as a child and attended the prestigious Smith College and, later, Cambridge University as a Fulbright Scholar. Many of her famous works revolve around the death of her father when she was 8 years old (see “Daddy,” “The Colossus,” “Lady Lazarus,” great pieces that examine mourning and existence after a loved one’s death.)
However, much more exists in the canon of Plath than simply her poetry, and I would recommend potential readers of Sylvia Plath begin with reading either Johnny Panicand The Bible of Dreamsor The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. The first is a collection of posthumously published short stories and essays (“Ocean 1212-W” is a great essay on her childhood living by the ocean, and “Tongues of Stone” draws from her personal time spent in mental institutions) each reeling with unique stories, characters and settings.
Plath’s journals are a gateway for better understanding to the rest of her work; detailed and ornate, her journals run from her teenage years interning in New York City, to her time as a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge, to her marriage and eventual suicide. Each page of this 766-page read feels like a conversation with Plath — an intimate catalog detailing her method of writing, love affairs, psychological ups and downs, and personal thoughts on God, success, and sex.
Her observations of herself and those around her produce intriguing one-liners such as, “I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual,” and “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”
Sylvia Plath is a rare creature in the realm of literature, one whose life equals, if not outshines, her literary career at times. While literature should be able to stand alone, Plath’s magnificence as a poet and writer is, for myself, only more vilified by accessing her personal life-peaking behind the curtain to see the workings that create the illusion on stage, so to speak. Her struggle to be taken seriously as a female writer at the male-dominated Cambridge, her presentation of the mental health community’s treatment of women in the 1950s and 60s, and her intense courtship with the equally famous Ted Hughes all captivate, but also add to the understanding of some of her more complex works.
Plath jokingly states in her only novel, “The Bell Jar,””There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
I encourage Sylvia Plath because of her approachability as an author, because of her simplicity in style and topics; she does not dazzle with sonnets or couplets, but with sincere emotion and imagery that is easily understood.
She led a damn interesting life and unearthing coinciding incidents in her literary works are part of her great draw as an author.
No matter what academic concentration you study, Sylvia Plath is an all-encompassing, cult-of-personality good read.
Joshua Bryant is a junior majoring in English. He can be contacted at
[email protected].