It is the FURY of Sylvia Plath, another peer, that makes Hardwick in an essay on the poet both so enraptured and uncomfortable. Sylvia like a dybbuk-double. Sylvia who was Lowell’s student in his writing class at Boston University, along with fellow housewife-poet Anne Sexton. Sylvia who only took the mask off for her poetry. The striptease of the Ariel femme fatale persona, the burlesque of trauma. Plath’s housewife’s revenge. The head in the gas oven. A brilliant symbol of both the Holocaust and the contained housewife. The feminine mystique is to return back to the smile—Sylvia swallowed
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