BOOK REVIEW: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
A Critical Literary Biography that Humanizes the Myth and Analyzes the Literary Art
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Sylvia Plath’s impact on American and English literature is undeniable. She twisted and stretched English and American poetry’s formalism and that allowed her honesty, energy and rage to burst the taboos of mental illness and oppressive social gender norms. Her work straddles the modern and postmodern literary movements and resides under the confessional poetry umbrella that includes Robert Lowell, who the term was first applied to, Anne Sexton and W.D. Snodgrass
Today high school and university students are often assigned her poetry and sole published novel The Bell Jar. Plath has influenced writers such as Erica Jong and the singer-songwriters Lana Del Ray, Lady Gaga, Madonna and Paul Westerberg. Even if one does not read her literary art, one knows Plath by her name alone.
But stereotypes and myth consume her genius and iconoclasim. For decades, Plath’s 1963 suicide and her lifelong battle with clinical depression overshadowed her writing and life. The public—especially teenage girls and women who live with mental illness—too often see her as tragic figure or their double (Plath focused on the double in her Smith College senior thesis that analyzed Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and in her own creative work). Plus the horrid, cringeworthy and ridiculous 1979 film adaptation that bastardized Plath’s novel didn’t help dispel her one-dimensional persona that defined her just by her suicide. If you want to sacrifice two hours of your life to see what I mean, click here.
Heather Clark’s 2020 biography, however, shatters not only that image but the posthumous Plath myth. The Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath ranks as the most astonishing biography I have read in my life so far. Clark’s granular research and writing reveals Plath’s nuances. Clark also focuses on how society and culture failed Plath and countless other women during the 1950s and 1960s with their sexist framework. This sexism was most destructive toward women who not only battled clinical depression and other mental illness but worked within the patriarchal literary and academic communities of the early and mid-twentieth century.
With access to new documents from the archives, including Plath’s unpublished creative works and letters, and journal entries and unpublished poems from Plath’s husband the English poet Ted Hughes, Clark’s 1,118-page critical biography provides a much richer work than previous Plath biographies. Also included are Clark’s interviews with Plath’s surviving friends, classmates and colleagues, making Red Comet the definitive Plath biography.
The Oxford-educated and award-winning biographer Clarke uses her literary scholarship to reveal more about Plath’s writing and life along with the era she came of age in. Living under the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation and the specter of the Holocaust’s horrors and crimes against humanity, Plath’s prolific juvenilia developed into the poetry and prose she’s known for. That age also influenced The Bell Jar . Both upended women’s literature as well as American and world literature.
In The Bell Jar, Clark argues how Plath used the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during Plath/Esther Greenwood’s New York college magazine internship to signify “Esther’s sick society—warmongering, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic—[that] has driven her to the brink of insanity. If her mind was maladjusted, so was the world in which she lived.”1 Clark also deconstructs how Plath later uses the quote she attributed to the mother of Esther’s boyfriend Buddy in her poem “Ariel.”
Buddy’s mother advises her son that “. . . a man is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.” ln “Ariel, Plath writes, “And I/ Am the arrow.”2 That image builds on Plath’s scholarship of James Joyce’s work A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Here the protagonist Stephen Dedalus craves to break free from the repression and oppression of Ireland’s culture and its dominant Catholic religion.3
After Plath’s death, her work and life emerged as touchstones in the building second-wave feminist movement that, admittedly, first swam in whiteness and used an upper and middle class perspective. After Plath’s final poetry collection Ariel and The Bell Jar were published in the United States, Clark notes how ”the women’s movement began to embrace Plath “ though Hughes maintained that many feminists misused Plath’s work and her biography to suit their own political agenda. The irony is that Hughes rearranged and excised Ariel following her suicide and included poems Plath had not originally intended to include in it.4 The American feminist poet, journalist and activist Robin Morgan even accused Hughes of murdering Plath in her poem “Arraignment” that appears in her poetry collection Monster. Morgan would later found Women’s Media Center with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda.
Clarke’s 21st century perspective allows her to recognize how trauma affected Plath throughout her life starting with the death of her father when she was only eight years old. Her father Otto was a German immigrant; her mother Aurelia was a first-generation descendent of Austrian immigrants who were “possibly Jewish.”5 Living in a country hostile to both nations and ethnicities in the early and mid twentieth century, their ethnic heritage impacted their lives and their daughter’s. This only compounded Plath’s existing trauma and her devoted practice to writing and literary scholarship.6 Her father’s and mother’s encounters with a xenophobic American society worsened by Nazism’s poison on German and Austrian identity also affected Plath and her work. Clark asserts:
Sylvia’s “perfectionism,” often derided as neurotic or pathological, needs to be understood within the historical and sociological context of the American immigrant experience, which framed her life. Her desire to excel on all fronts has its roots in the German’s aspirational work ethic that was her inheritance.7
. . . .
In her 1962 poem “Daddy,” the German language itself becomes “the barb wire snare” and “the language obscene,” “An engine, an engine/ Chuffing me off like a Jew” to the death camps. Plath’s notorious metaphorical appropriation of Jewishness may not have been a fantasy of victimization, but rather a fantasy of purgation and purity; only by aligning her speaker with the enemy of the Germans could she reject her own Germanness, which, in the wake of the Holocaust, seemed like a curse.8
Clark’s meticulous scholarship, investigation and analysis dispel the tragic romanticism of women artists and the sexism behind mental illness. Along with inheriting her parents’ intelligence, Plath also inherited depression and anxiety9 In her early sixties, Plath’s grandmother Ernestine ended up committed to an insane asylum because of her clinical depression and died there.10 Clark quotes Plath’s mother Aurelia who shared with a friend after her daughter’s 1963 suicide that “Sylvia’s tendency to depression was experienced by members of her father’s family, stretching to three generations.”11 An example of American culture and media reducing Plath to just her mental illness and minimizing or distorting the seriousness of her genetic disposition toward clinical depression can be found in The Bell Jar’s horrid 1979 film adaptation, the biopic Sylvia and an episode of Apple TV+’s Dickinson.
The misogyny toward and fetishizing of mentally ill women artists continues today though it was far worse during Plath’s time. After news of Plath’s suicide broke, a man in a pub near the BBC where Hughes and Plath contributed and were interviewed quipped, “[W]omen poets, what do you expect?”12 Originally after her suicide, Hughes and the poet, novelist and literary critic A. Alvarez, who championed Plath’s work in life and after her death, originally believed Plath had a death drive and whose writing practice allowed her to be “overcome by her demons.” 13 Only later did Alvarez begin to recognize that his rejection of Plath romantically during her deep depression could have exacerbated her torment. Hughes also realized her poorly treated depression caused her death.14
With Clark noting the depression that killed Plath early in her biography, it makes readers empathetic and aware. Once we reach Plath’s first suicide attempt following her Mademoiselle magazine internship that depression marred and her successful one in London, England at the age of 30, we feel for Plath and grieve for what American and British letters have lost. Clark does not reduce Plath to a joke or a trope. Instead she brings back to life a full human being failed by Western culture, society and the medical industry. Sadly Plath’s son Nicholas also inherited his mother’s and paternal ancestors clinical depression and in 2009 took his own life.
But the bulk of Clark’s work remains on Plath’s superlative and seminal poetry and prose. Unlike previous biographies, Clark had access to what remained of Plath’s unpublished and unfinished novel Falcon Yard that she began while on her Fulbright fellowship to Cambridge University; years later when Plath learned of Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill, she burned early drafts of her second novel, a sequel to The Bell Jar, that were based off Falcon Yard.15
Most importantly, Clark provides context for Ariel. The original edition was not the collection Plath had envisioned or created. In 2004, Plath’s daughter the poet and artist Frieda Hughes put together the “restored edition” of Ariel. Ted Hughes included the poems Plath wrote when her depression was at its worse, including “Edge” that closes out The Collected Poems that Hughes also edited. 16
Clark examines how Robert Graves’s classic work The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth that influenced and impacted Hughes poetry hovers over the creation of “Edge.” Here Plath angrily “indicts a sexist culture and literary tradition that equated perfect womanhood with passivity and compliancy” and proves how her literary knowledge of authors ranging from ancient Greek mythology, D.H. Lawrence, Sara Teasdale, William Butler Yeats and Shakespeare influenced her verses.17
Red Comet is not a hagiography though. Clark uses her critical scholarship and investigative skill to present Plath with all her faults, cruelty, wrath, and anger toward Hughes, her mother, and past boyfriends. Clark also acknowledges Plath’s ableism and racism that includes her “perform[ing] in blackface in a minstrel show” while a Girl Scout. 18
Well-documented and meticulous, Red Comet’s prose energetically narrates Plath’s life and work making the book an intellectual page turner. Some readers may be put off by the biography’s length and detail, but they should not be. Red Comet must be read by any fan of Plath’s work and included in the libraries of literary and feminist scholars and historians of the United States and Great Britain.
Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2020; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 2021), 263.
Clark, 264.
Clark, 264.
Clark, 932; 933-934.
Clark, 5. 6, 14, 15, 16, 22.
Clark, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23.
Clark, 4.
Clark, 5-6.
Clark, 3.
Clark, 8-9.
Clark, 8.
Clark, 919.
Clark, 923-924.
Clark, 924, 930.
Clark, xix, 453, 726.
Clark, 871-875, 924, 932-933.
Clark, 875.
Clark 73, 102.
I knew the name, but have never read anything by Plath. This will be corrected as she sounds fascinating. What she went through in regard to her reaction to the horrific world she lived in seems to resonate with what many of us still go through today. This is why I adore Substack as I learn so much about people I never knew.
Last year I think it was, I met a high school student who was on her 3rd or 4th reading of Red Comet!