Bigger than ever. More widely read than ever. There are still people desecrating her grave due to some heinously flawed thinking and beliefs. And, too, there are still legions of inconsiderate, insensitive people out there that crassly make mental health jokes at her expense. This is a sad, sad thing.
There are several Sylvia Plaths out there. "Popular culture" Sylvia Plath is massive. But, she is very different from both the literary Sylvia Plath and the actual Sylvia Plath.
Popular culture Sylvia Plath's reputation is somewhat death-centric. Maybe this will never change and that is simply sad, too. Popular culture Sylvia Plath is defined by her "depression" and her death. It sees in her life and in her writing nothing but depression and death. It does not see the nuances that make any life more complicated than just pigeon-holing her in depression and death. Death is a theme across her writings. This is a simple fact. Death is fascinating! Death happened to her, but it should not define her. But I am preaching to the choir, to use a cliché, and beating my head against a wall, to use another. Some of Plath's writing about death is humorous; some darkly so. Some is deadly serious.
In re-reading The Bell Jar in January, I was struck with an idea about Plath and death. Plath was fascinated by doubles, dualities, twins, and the symmetry of things of that nature. So it might be the case that in much of her writing any focus on death is an acknowledgement of, and a respect and reverence for, life. Everything that Plath wrote is an antidote to death.
This is never so clear than in Plath's beautiful piece entitled "Context", when she wrote:
"For me, the real issues of our time are the issues of every time—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms—children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardizing of which no abstract doubletalk of ‘peace’ or ‘implacable foes’ can excuse."
Plath writes, too, about breath in "Context". Breath is, of course, the essence of life. And Plath writes about breath maybe more than one may realize. "Context" was written in the autumn of 1961. This was in the first months after she finished The Bell Jar.
In some of the recordings of Plath reading her poetry you can hear her inhaling and exhaling; and an added feature of her living life is that sometimes you can hear paper turning as she goes from one page to another of a longer poem. This dexterous activity is another proof of life: it is movement.
In the midst of the depression Plath experienced in the summer of 1953, she wrote "And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt" (Journals 545). The worst enemy of self-doubt is creativity and Sylvia Plath, time and time again, wrote beautiful creative works which are a direct defiance of depression and death.
Plath's editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, expressed Plath's uniqueness in a letter she sent on 28 December 1962, writing that they, the publishers, respect "so much your lovely use of language and your sharp eye for unusual and vivid detail".
Plath examined life like a botanist exams plants. It is an honor to have access to her writings, to see the world as she saw fit to capture it.
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