2 - The Autobiographical Writings
Summary
Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. An occasion of ‘chattering’ with audience much as the occasion with Eliot will turn out, I suppose. I spoke, almost in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us, although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me an expert manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new flowering life.
(Jour. Sunday, 4 October 1959)Framing The Journals of Sylvia Plath with his foreword, Ted Hughes suggests that, in contrast to all her other writings, these texts represent ‘her day to day struggle with her warring selves, for herself only’ (Jour. p. xv). Because of his conviction that all her writing before Ariel was tainted by her ambition to produce stories and poems in the manner required by the prestigious magazines in which she wanted to see her work published, Hughes locates the impulse behind this record of her psychic strife in the ‘relentless passion’ as well as the ‘fever of uncertainty and self-doubt’ with which she came ‘to apprentice herself to various masters and to adapt her writing potential to practical, profitable use’ (Jour. p. xiii). Enmeshed with this desire for success, however, Hughes finds a second battle waged in the pages of these Journals. As he confesses to the readers of these autobiographical writings, ‘Sylvia Plath was a person of many masks, both in her personal life and in her writings. Some were camouflage cliché facades, defensive mechanisms, involuntary. And some were deliberate poses, attempts to find the keys to one style or another.’ Yet, while ‘these were the visible faces of her lesser selves, her false or provisional selves, the minor roles of her inner drama’, the ‘real self’, Hughes surmises, was dumb for most of her life. Shut away beneath the bustle of ‘conflicting voices of the false and petty selves’, behind the ‘bundles of contradictory and complementary selves’ with which, like most people, she had come to present herself to the world, it only managed to find its voice in the Ariel poems.
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- Sylvia PlathElisabeth Bronfen, pp. 32 - 61Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2004