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Some Bitchin’ Sylvia Plath Book News

Edward Butscher's biography Sylvia Plath: Method & Madness is now available in Kindle book format.  It is also available through Amazon.co.uk.

In case you were struck, as I was, at the incessant repetition of the phrase "bitch goddess" in the text and wondered just how many times it was used...the mystery has been solved! It appears 40 times. 30 times as "the bitch goddess"; 3 as "her bitch goddess"; 2 as "imprisoned bitch goddess"; and 1 each as "emerging bitch goddess", "hidden bitch goddess", "raging bitch goddess", "combination bitch goddess", and "appellation bitch goddess." Phew, now I can get some sleep.
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Comments

  1. P.H.Davies18 July, 2011 07:22

    I've only read excerpts of Butscher's book - that was enough for me. Possibly one of the worst - right up there with Paul Alexander.

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  2. Peter K Steinberg18 July, 2011 13:51

    I'm with you on this one! I've read it and found it so tiresome. The advantage to the Kindle version is the searching; I won't have to re-read it again (though if I'm looking for anything about Assia Wevill or North Tawton or Richard Norton I have to remember to look them up by their fake names).

    pks

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  3. m a r i e18 July, 2011 15:01

    LOL, funny calculation!
    I haven't read that book. I've read the Wagner martin's book about sylvia Plath and The Silent Women, by J. Malcolm

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  4. Kristina Zimbakova18 July, 2011 16:46

    I haven't read anything from the book but this queer bitching by the author is hilarious; "combination bitch goddess" tops it all.

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  5. Peter K Steinberg18 July, 2011 17:57

    Marie Augustine, you're not really missing anything by not reading it...

    Kristina, the context of that phrase is:

    "The 'bitch,' of course, is a familiar enough figure—a discontented, tense, frequently brilliant woman goaded into fury by her repressed or distorted status in a male society; and the 'goddess' conveys the opposite image, a more creative one, though it too represents an extreme. As a combination, 'bitch goddess' has the additional advantage of a long metaphorical association—at least from the time of D. H. Lawrence—with fierce ambition and ruthless pursuit of success."

    So, I don't really think in this context he's necessarily talking about Plath...the above appears in the "Preface" so I suppose he's preparing the reader not only for his reading of Plath's life, for foul language in general. The 70s were a dark time indeed.

    The word bitch (and words in which it appears as the root, like bitchiness [2 times]) appears 55 times according to a search I just conducted... To my disappointment, bitchtastic wasn't in there...

    pks

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  6. Peter K Steinberg18 July, 2011 18:02

    Also, no bitch-slap, which would have been awesome and redeemed the book in some small way. I can imagine the sentence in which this would appear.... The 'Ariel' poems, written by Plath in her bitch-goddess avatar persona, not only reveal a certain snarky bitchiness of the writer and her predicament, but also serves to bitch-slap Ted Hughes and those who have brought out Plath's inner-bitch...

    Just to conclude, there are no references to either biatch-goddess (this would be the Snoop-Dogg biography of Plath), bitchrific, or bitchitude either.

    pks

    P.S. I am not drunk (yet).

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  7. Kristina Zimbakova18 July, 2011 18:18

    Thanks for the explanation, Peter. Anyway, the oxymoron 'bitch goddess' is 'a combination' that I think will forever puzzle me. I would have forgiven the author if he had been creative enough to use the fantastic 'bitchtastic' but unfortunately he didn't.

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  8. Anonymous19 July, 2011 10:37

    Funny!

    Perhaps even more depressing than the "bitchiness" of Edward Butscher's book (and wasn't it telling by the way that Ted Hughes confused the two and referred to Plath's psychologist as Beutscher rather than Beuscher) is the phenomenally bitchtastic Bitter Fame. So shocking how Plath is repeatedly referred to as "deadly", "neurotic", "enraged"
    etc. by Anne Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes while TH is presented as her helpless victim.

    What makes it even more distateful is that Plath is no longer here to speak for herself, making her something of a "sitting duck" for attacks by the mean-minded.

    ~VC

    PS: Congratulations on PP4!

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  9. suki20 July, 2011 09:12

    Nonetheless, despite shortcomings, Butscher's biography has some very good scholarship when you consider how difficult it was in 1972-1975 to find a lot of work from Plath; there is a considerable amount that other scholars now take for granted : Assia Wevill, different versions of poems; plath and hughes working together...
    there are shortcomings but it was unauuhtorised (has there been an authorised biography?).
    It's an instructive book for its time

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  10. Peter K Steinberg20 July, 2011 09:16

    Hi Suki,

    Bitter Fame was the authorized biography of Plath. And I agree that Butscher's book is somewhat remarkable given the time it was written.

    Cheers
    peter

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  11. suki20 July, 2011 09:49

    Sorry, I forgot,with the hoohaa over how much of the biography, Ted Hughes had 'written' and which parts were so disliked by different 'sides' at the time, that, yes, Hughes had authorised Bitter Fame.

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  12. Anonymous22 July, 2011 04:29

    Peter - you're hilarious! What a bitchin' blog-post!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Julia Gordon-Bramer25 July, 2011 09:53

    Really, the whole "Bitch Goddess" thing just proves Butscher is a classic male chauvinist. Woman must be put in a box, either as a bitch or as a sexual being (or in Plath's case, both). Would he ever repetitively call a man a "raging god," or something of that ilk? I doubt it.

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  14. panther26 July, 2011 18:15

    Julia, no, he wouldn't use a phrase like "raging god." Really, this kind of male chauvinism is so obvious ! And far from dead. How many times do we encounter the expression "X is one of Finland's best women poets" or some such ? If there were a genuine equivalent ("man poet") in the English language, that would be okay, but there isn't. The implication is "Well, she's good for a woman, but there are obviously better men doing this sort of thing." And I STILL come across "poetess." Horrendous.

    ReplyDelete

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