Loving Sylvia Plath Quotes

“Sylvia Plath is not a writer. She is written: a corpse bride in her husband’s perpetual romance.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Hughes’s declarations that he and Plath shared the same mind, body, and a fate that put circumstances beyond their control reduce her to less than adjunct to her famous husband,”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“The immediate correlation of Plath’s suicide with her poetry has trained us to hear the many voices she left behind as coming from beyond the grave, rather than as the record of her life—a unique form of censorship.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Plath survived her 1953 suicide attempt because she took too many pills and vomited them up. In 1963, she took enough to ensure her death. There was no escape hatch. That was the point.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“What follows is my best effort to shed as much light as possible on events that have not simply been forgotten or left in the dark, but relegated to the attic, or the ash can, or the metaphorical darkness of fear and shame, and to reignite Plath's fire in the parlor where her fans squint to read by flickering gaslight; above them, the man searches the attic for the jewels he hid too well.What follows is my best effort to shed as much light as possible on events that have not simply been forgotten or left in the dark, but relegated to the attic, or the ash can, or the metaphorical darkness of fear and shame, and to reignite Plath's fire in the parlor where her fans squint to read by flickering gaslight; above them, the man searches the attic for the jewels he hid too well.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“flight. Are we not at risk in doing this of putting ourselves, putting feminism, in the place of the idealised and idealizing mother who can bear to see nothing bad in her daughter?”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“like the dead woman in “Edge,” we, too, might be perfected.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Morgan wrote that it was not—or anyway, it was not in 1972—libel to say a husband raped his wife, because in 1972, the act was still legal (it wouldn’t be declared illegal in the United Kingdom and the United States until 1993 and 1994, respectively).”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Plath was a summa cum laude graduate of one of the best English literature programs in the United States, and a Fulbright Scholar, yet he wrote to Anne Stevenson in 1986, “as for her mastery of literature I was mainly astounded—and I mean astounded—by what she had not read.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Brownmiller writes that Plath’s violent relationship was one cause of her suicide, offering Plath as a high-profile example of the masochism women in heteronormative relationships were required to possess to endure them. This masochism had “gotten out of hand” for Plath by the time she killed herself.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“In 1970, seventeen months after the deaths of Assia and Shura Wevill, Ted Hughes married Carol Orchard. She was twenty-two and he was forty. He left her on their wedding night to be with Brenda Hedden. This was the double life that Hughes was already leading by the time of Plath’s death. For Plath, it was intolerable. By February 1963, the only possible marriage left to them was Middlebrook’s resonant myth, where Hughes was Orpheus and Plath was dead. BIRTHDAY LETTERS HAS MOSTLY”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“When Hughes tells Leeming he can access what Plath is thinking not just now but in the life she had prior to knowing him, we can read in this a classic sign of intimate partner violence, almost always rooted in a desire to know everything about one’s spouse so that one can wield power over that person.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Did their agony exist solely to test him, which, so says this logic, created great poetry?”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Hughes stayed married in spirit to Sylvia Plath until his death. Since he and Plath had set off to be great artists together when they married in June 1956—a journey that, in 1962, he abandoned—poetry was the way Ted Hughes was faithful to Sylvia Plath.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Every time she tells someone, I thought, it’s like its happening again for the first time. That fall, in a playwriting class, I wondered, What if you didn’t tell people? What if you pretended it never happened?”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“was the tragic lark of an irresponsible, wildly gifted artist who gambled her life for her art, and lost. In his letter to Wagner-Martin, Dr. Horder addresses this trend, calling it “so limited an explanation as to be nearly ridiculous.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Doctor Horder, whose notes to biographers and critics are remarkably consistent. His patient intended to die. Moreover, he believed that she did so in a psychotic state that, as he wrote to Linda Wagner-Martin, “seems to me to take away most of the blame for depriving two young children of their mother.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Assia, living, and ultimately refusing to conform to the demands he made about the size and shape of her body, the way she spoke and dressed, and the role she played in his life, could not be espaliered.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“In his work, Hughes assigned two people the power to meddle with fate and, ultimately, to kill. Both died.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“But as the poet Kathleen Ossip reminds us in her Plath-inspired poem “No Use,” “Thanks to her habit of journal keeping and her resolve to memorialize her experience in writing, Sylvia forgot nothing.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“dictated by unseen forces, rather than human beings living in ordinary time. His Plath character had “No case” in her argument that she had made her writing career second to her husband’s.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“Manne’s theory of misogyny as the punishment arm of sexism sheds considerable light on the tenor of Plath’s continued reception, one that emerged from a need to discipline and contain a woman writer who had fled the control of her husband, lovers, and teachers”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

“second-wave feminists, who believed Plath had turned the personal details of her life into overtly political art.”
― Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation