The Haunting of Sylvia Plath

by Jacqueline Rose

A classic piece of literary criticism addressing both the writer and the icon

Since her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, Sylvia Plath has become a strange icon. This book addresses why this is the case and what this tells us about the way culture picks out important writers. The author argues that without a concept of fantasy we can understand neither Plath's work nor what she has come to represent. She proposes that no writer demonstrates more forcefully than Plath the importance of inner psychic life for the wider sexual and political world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Literary Criticism, Poetry, Biography Memoir, Theory, Philosophy

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Jacqueline Rose, FBA (born 1949, London) is a British academic who is currently Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Rose was born into a non-practicing Jewish family. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose. Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford and gained her higher degree (maîtrise) from the Sorbonne, Paris and her doctorate from the University of London.

Her book Albertine, a novel from 2001, is a feminist variation on Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

She is best known for her critical study on the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, published in 1991. In the book, Rose offers a postmodernist feminist interpretation of Plath's work, and criticises Plath's husband Ted Hughes and other editors of Plath's writing. Rose describes the hostility she experienced from Hughes and his sister (who acts as literary executor to Plath's estate) including threats received from Hughes about some of Rose's analysis of Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher". The Haunting of Sylvia Plath was critically acclaimed, and itself subject to a famous critique by Janet Malcolm in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Rose is a regular broadcaster on and contributor to the London Review of Books.

Rose's States of Fantasy was the inspiration for composer Mohammed Fairouz's Double Concerto of the same title.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is almost certainly the best book I've ever read on Plath; also possibly the most difficult one. It's difficult to classify, as Rose integrates lit-crit with a great deal of metacriticism on the iconography (the "fantasia," as T Hughes calls it, and a phrase Rose lifts from him for this text) enveloping Plath. It's not a biography, as Rose has no particular interest in the 'facts' of the life, though one might say it's still powerfully invested in the idea of narrating Plath's life. Rose seems to be something of a psychoanalytic critic, though her logic works far more deconstructively than I usually expect in Plath-critics with a psychoanalytical bent: this is very good, because though she certainly discusses structures of fantasy and desire, she's also very capable of considering these in a more discursive (and not pathologizing) fashion. She's unflinching when it comes to discussing those who have claimed the 'right' of talking about Plath (Anne Stevenson, David Holbrook, Ted & Olwyn Hughes), but also enables us to think about WHY the 'talk' about Plath has had such a fractured history--why Plath (the "Marilyn Monroe of the literati") allegorizes broader-reaching cultural anxieties around feminism, sexuality, violence (and desire *for* violence), &co&co.

I could go on and on, & perhaps will at a later date, upon a thorough re-reading (I had to move quickly through it this time, as I was trying to use it for a paper with a quick turnaround)--nevertheless, this is absolutely required reading for any serious Plath scholars. Probably for anyone interested in the question of female icons, morbid celebrity fascinations, and the transitions in these conceptions of women in the public eye in the post-war period--but I doubt some of the psychoanalytic discussions will be as useful for those less invested in Plath (who, to my mind, has been so destroyed by psychoanalysis and biographical readings with foundations in that discourse). It is a challenging read, but of the four (jesus, I should get another hobby?) books on Plath I've read so far this year--and of the ones I've read in the past--this was by far the most influential in my own work. Or at least, it definitely feels that way now. Read also: Narbeshuber's "Confessing Cultures" if you like this one.

[Dajana · Rating 5 out of 5]

U potpunosti mi se uklapa Silvijina Groznica 41 uz čitanje ove knjige na ovoj temperaturi. :(

[Steven Critelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though published in 1991, Jacqueline Rose's masterpiece still remains the finest analysis of Sylvia Plath's legacy to date. Rose examines the principal themes of Plath's poetry and prose, which naturally entails a review of Plath's critics and biographers, as well as a discussion of the notorious editorial judgments and copyright licensing positions taken by her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, and his sister, Olwyn. In the process, Rose also delves into the question of the role of biography in literary analysis and whether the work can be appropriately safeguarded when it directly affects and even infringes the privacy concerns of others. Because we can never know what Plath's inner life was really like, Rose argues against critical interpretations that primarily treat Plath's work as an extension of biographical matter gleaned from her journals, correspondence and the memorialized oral accounts of family, friends and acquaintances. But Rose's critique, which incorporates metacritical, psychoanalytical and deconstructive viewpoints, also affirms the value of biography as an indispensable piece of the puzzle and one means of accessing the multiple levels on which her poetry, in particular, exists.

Of note, the writing and publication of Rose's study led to a daunting confrontation with Hughes and his sister (recounted in the 1991 and 1995 Prefaces) over their own invested views of Plath's life and their unconcealed efforts to steer public scrutiny away from Hughes and push alternative narratives of Plath. This was done, according to Hughes, in the interest of protecting his children from public obloquy over Plath's mental illness and suicide. In concert with these goals, Hughes elected to destroy Plath's journals from the last three years of her life and selectively redact portions of the surviving journals and correspondence, as well as significantly edit Ariel, all of which irremediably influenced public perceptions to the detriment of Plath's personal reputation and her work, consequently impairing the scholarship to come. [Unabridged versions of the surviving journals were finally published in late 2000, and a definitive edition of Plath's complete correspondence is being published in two volumes, respectively, in 2017 and 2018. A discussion of the difficulty of weaning critical perceptions from the misleading narrative promoted by Hughes may be found in Tracy Brain's The Other Sylvia Plath.]

The use of Plath's copyright to boldly compel critics and biographers to follow a Hughes-directed narrative is covered at length in the chapter entitled "The Archive" and makes for one of the more interesting behind-the-book stories in the history of literature. Rose's account of Olwyn Hughes's conduct, especially, is unquestionably accurate given similar experiences independently reported by Judith Kroll, Anne Stevenson, Lynda Bundtzen and Janet Malcolm, among others, whose valor must be invariably measured by the respective degrees of their conscientious resistance. Though Ted Hughes's ardent pleas for privacy (chiefly, he said, to protect his children) had legitimate purposes, Rose argues that the publication of Plath's private papers unequivocally invited the invasive exploration of critics and biographers that he could have otherwise avoided. Plath doubtlessly would have felt violated and shamed by the way her poetry and prose works have been viewed in the half-light of her private journals and personal correspondence. The journals featured notoriously conflicted autobiographical entries, and the letters to Aurelia Plath were admittedly designed as sugar-coated glosses on Plath’s actual life. Rose trenchantly observes that the Estate’s efforts to edit and redact these documents, on the grounds that they violated privacy and good taste, instead revealed that Plath’s own viewpoint was being tortuously silenced. Certainly, the justifiable questioning of Hughes's editorial prudence and suspect motives, especially considering his dubious personal conduct and self-righteous rhetoric, will probably never abate.

Following this line of inquiry Rose raises the fundamental question of whether and how reliable textual analysis can be undertaken when the work has been adulterated or obscured by its caretakers, the copyright holders, who have personal stakes at risk. This, perforce, implicates Hughes's contention that he, as the administrator of Plath's estate, had the right to control access to and the interpretation of her work, principally because her living relatives (viz., her children, her mother and Hughes himself) and their rights to privacy are compromised by it. Though Hughes died in 1998, his position remains an intriguing problem that is relevant to all future scholarship. Further, as if there weren't enough irony afoot, the libel case against the producers of the film version of The Bell Jar demonstrates how privacy concerns have broader implications beyond the private lives of Plath's immediate family. This ironically had the effect of reducing the fictional and creative aspects of Plath’s work to mere autobiographical transcription of the “confessional” genre according to M.L. Rosenthal’s analysis. No matter how surreal Plath’s flights of fancy, everyone keeps looking for the roman à clef , thereby depriving the work of its larger purposes.

The sensational speculations that no critic and biographer can apparently avoid (labeled "the myth of Sylvia Plath" by Hughes and his sister) naturally flow from the story of a brilliant young woman's battle with mental illness, her marriage to the most promising young poet of his time, her struggle for recognition in a historically male-dominated profession, and her ultimate suicide following her estrangement from Hughes. Its cosmic irony was inflamed by the public acclaim that followed the U.S. publication of The Bell Jar and Ariel, and its tabloid credentials were stoked to hellish white by the checkered personal history of Hughes himself--whose adulterous relationship with Assia Wevill likely precipitated Plath's downward spiral, and whose personal reputation was further compromised by Wevill’s own death, killing herself and the couple’s infant daughter. It is a story, as Rose says, that "seems to have the power to draw everybody who approaches it into its orbit, to make you feel that somehow you belong." But it challenges us to question how much intrusive inquiry is warranted in the service of art and attendant scholarship, especially where mental illness is a stalking ghost, and whether such an investigation of the author's life threatens our perceptions of the art altogether. Where editorial decisions were made by Hughes, his judgments clearly pitted the shifting perspectives of the truth about his relationship to Plath against the interpretative ambiguities of words that were made to serve other masters. Rose convincingly argues that the wholeness of a literary work should never be sacrificed; but to her credit she fairly examines all facets of the arguments, for and against, with great sensitivity.

To the extent that Rose's approach may be labeled "feminist," it is one that is wholly defensible in light of the way Plath's male critics (for the most part) have apprehended her work and life. In the first chapter of her book (entitled "She") Rose evaluates the masculine bias that initially confronted Plath's work, whether from the mouths of critics like Hugh Kenner and Richard Howard, biographer Edward Butscher, A. Alvarez (a personal friend and confidant), and even notable female poet and novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Rose shows, through a discerning examination of the critical language itself, how this animus may be traced to the predominantly male lens of our culture, which Plath challenged with poems like "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy." Because Plath threatened the hegemony of that male image, which even today fosters a view of itself as protector and keeper of the higher forms of art, she was (and is) typically relegated to a lower order, a "good" or "minor" (but by no means "major") poet. Therefore, the question of Plath's ascendance is a political as well as aesthetic question.

Notably, Rose eschews a programmatic disqusition, such as Judith Kroll's Chapters in a Mythology, which, though first to attempt a comprehensive analysis of Plath's poetry (reading it principally through the twin lenses of Robert Graves' The White Goodess and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough), failed to account for Plath's own conflicted perceptions as they are reflected in her work. Rose's readings, by contrast, are subtle and complex, exhibiting and questioning the work from a myriad of angles, often through Freudian and Jungian models, while admitting that there is no Rosetta Stone by which the works taken together may be easily translated because of the "multiplicity of representations that Plath offers of herself." That Plath was keenly aware of these complexities is evidenced by cross-reading her journals against her correspondence and work. Rose does not attempt an exhaustive examination of Plath's poems ad seriatim, choosing rather to support her observations with surgical application of examples from the poems and prose, though more in-depth discussions of particular poems ensue where necessary to a deeper analysis of her propositions.

Self-defeating, however, is Rose's misadventure into a psychological analysis of Plath as artist in Chapter 2 ("The Body of the Writing), just the thing that C.G. Jung said must not be done [in "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry": “the question of aetiology in medicine is quite out of place in dealing with a work of art, just because a work of art is not a human being, but is something supra-personal. . . . Indeed, the special significance of a true work of art resides in the fact that it has escaped from the limitations of the personal and has soared beyond the personal concerns of its creator.”]. Which means the "truth" of a given poem is suspect in the way every poem is a language game and hence does not traffic in utilitarian statements of fact. Therefore, Rose's analyses of individual poems (particularly in the chapter, "No Fantasy Without Protest") are more an exhibition of erudition and much less a penetrating literary critique, as readings such poems as "The Rabbit Catcher," "Fever 103º" and "Getting There" founder because the resultant interpretations are meant to serve certain masters and ignore others, which is to also say that, for example, a greater understanding of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as applied to specific writings can only begin and end in rank speculation, or that noting a journal entry when Plath was 17 years old may not be the best way to gain insight into a poem written more than ten years later. Using her psychoanalytical approach, Rose inevitably binds herself to biographically-tinged readings, almost wholly ignoring Plath's tonal sarcasm and irony for the most part. I think Rose makes a good case for reading the late poems in dialogue with each other, but the same thing could be said about poems written before then as Plath frequently wrote poems that appeared to respond to earlier work.

Rose does provide an impressive treatment of "Daddy" in the final chapter, which presents a brilliant defense of Plath's controversial use of Holocaust imagery and a provocative deliberation on Plath's most incendiary line, "Every woman adores a Fascist / The boot in the face," with all its sado-masochistic implications.

Though Rose's application of psychoanalytic theory does get wonkish at times, and though her examination too often circles back to the same points and conclusions, the prolific scholarship and intellectual acumen brought to bear on the subject matter is all that could be desired. If you are going to read only one critical perspective on Sylvia Plath's work, this is it.

[Kallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eschewing the usual blame narratives, Rose takes a detailed, analytical look at Plath's life and writing. Her main interest: how Plath herself explored the ways in which victim/aggressor can be internalized, projected, questioned as they interface with one's life. This is not a book for anyone who thinks they already know what Plath was 'about,' or wants simple explanations for her behavior and writing, or that of Ted and Olwyn Hughes, or why she chose the Holocaust as a metaphor in 'Daddy.' Instead, we are treated to a top-rate mind's investigation of these subjects, in (but not only in) psychoanalytic metaphors. Reading this book is a challenge; I had to re-read sections more than once. But persistence is rewarded, not only with a more expansive view of Plath, but of writing poetry, and how an artist's life events and the culture of politics in which that is embedded are important aspects of the poetic process.

[Ramona Ezra]

It took me a while to finish this book because it's quite a scholarly and academic tome. I only stuck with it because I do find Sylvia Plath to be a very interesting author who fascinates people in many ways.
The book is not a biography, but it deals with her works (her poetry, prose, and her journals). Rose writes about the manner in which her literary estate controlled her works and whatever biographical information that came out. Another issue that Rose deals with is that of Ted Hughes, Plath's husband at the time of her death, who was careless with some of her works (such as the last two journals and an unpublished novel). If you're a literary geek and a Plath fan, you will enjoy this book, although hopefully it won't take you 5 months to finish it.

[Niccy]

Recommended this to my best friend Clairo

[Adi]

Parts of this reminded me of Pomona. Other parts were good!

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Haunting of Sylvia Plath is one of the best works of literary criticism I've read. Rose creates a narrative of her own journey through the works about Plath, while illuminating the shortcomings of how Plath has been received critically and biographically.

[Phoebe Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so good at encouraging my interest for Sylvia Plath and who she was as a woman and a writer. I resonate with what Plath went through and this book gives you a real and complex insight into who she was and what/ who she had to overcome. It was challenging at times, but managed to pull me right back in. I enjoyed the way it made me reflect and actually use my brain.

[Radhika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best book on Plath ever. A must read.

[maría de las nieves · Rating 3 out of 5]

strokes of brilliance, overly biographical

[Cath Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

The muscularity with which Rose debunks the wealth of biographical writing- tripe - that clutters criticism of Plath's work is exceptionally helpful for any reader interested in acquiring insight into the historical trajectory of feminist and psychoanalytical approaches to the poet. A must-read for any Plath scholar.