Emily Van Duyne Is Rewriting the Myth of Sylvia Plath

Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath is a deeply researched, beautifully written look at Plath’s complicated legacy and what the writers’s life can tell us about womanhood, ambition, domestic violence, and artmaking. Van Duyne writes the book as both a Plath scholar and a “superfan,” and as someone whose own experience of domestic violence gave her a lens into Plath’s violent marriage to the poet Ted Hughes.

I talked with Van Duyne about the mythology of Sylvia Plath and the more complex—funny, petty, occasionally bitchy, wickedly smart and business savvy—version of Plath her research uncovered.

Nancy Reddy: The mythology around Plath is just so powerful. When I was starting to write poetry, I felt like I knew her because I knew about her death. What does that mythology of Plath get wrong?

Emily Van Duyne: That mythology has made us incapable of separating her life and her poetry. When you’ve all these really bad ideas about her life and her death, then you’re going to, by necessity, misread the poetry. The two most prominent examples of that are the poems “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy.” In the case of “Lady Lazarus,” because we read the poem backwards through the lens of Plath’s suicide, we assume that it’s predicting her death. But when you read her diaries and her letters, that’s really not true. That poem was actually written over a span of three days between October 27 and October 31, 1962, when Plath was having this incredible creative upswing. Hughes had left the marriage and had officially moved out of their home. She had a really good nanny, and she was writing about how the weather was beautiful and she actually had time to write. So she’s actually writing this poem about rebirth. It’s partially through the lens of her first suicide attempt. But at no point in October of 1962 is she thinking, Well, you know, in February I’m gonna put my head in the oven. That’s absurd. But that’s how the poem gets read.

NR: One of the things that I love about your book is how you show us so much about Plath as a full person. What are some of the stories that you wish people knew about her?

EVD: One of my favorite stories about Plath is that in the summer of 1961, when she was pregnant with her second child, Nicholas, her mother came over from America to watch Frida, their older daughter, who was about a year at the time. Plath and Hughes decide that they’re going to take up W. S. Merwin and his second wife Dido on their offer to come and spend a week at their French farmhouse.

Dido Merwin wrote a memoir about the visit, and it was published as an appendix to Anne Stevenson’s 1989 biography of Plath, Bitter Fame. Dido is an extraordinary cook and she buys all these amazing groceries, including a fons foie gras which costs an arm and a leg, and she makes from scratch—even makes the pasta from scratch—this gorgeous lasagna. On the first day that they’re there, she’s going to serve the lasagna for dinner, and Hughes and the Merwins go out for a walk—and Sylvia bakes the lasagna and eats the whole thing by herself. She also ate the entirety of the foie gras herself. Dido said she dipped into the fons foie gras “like it was Aunt Dot’s meatloaf.”

NR: In the book you also write about Plath’s incredible business savvy. She effectively ran the business side of her and Hughes’s writing life, right?

EVD: Not only did she run the business side of their writing life, she allowed them to have that life in the first place. Even when she was a student, she was constantly selling her writing and always making money off of her writing. Hughes was working odd jobs. If you read some of the more flattering biographies of him they’ll say he was working as a reader at J. Arthur Rank, where he would periodically read scripts and offer feedback. But most of what he was doing was going to the London Zoo and staring at the jaguars in their cages.

They married four months after they met, and in the second year of their marriage, after Plath finished her Fulbright, Plath had a teaching appointment at Smith, so they moved back to the States. Hughes taught part time for the second half of the year at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but he hated it. And then at that point Plath decides they’re going to take a gamble and live in Boston and try to write full time. The reason that they’re able to do that is because Hughes wins a Guggenheim—but she filled out the application for him!

NR: It’s amazing to think of her doing all of the writing she was doing, and then also doing all of the clerical work for both of them.

EVD: It’s really telling that the explosion of Plath’s work, a lot of it happens after Hughes leaves the marriage. She felt like her writing was in a slog for a couple of years after they married, and his was really taking off. And it really seems like that’s because she was also doing all of his labor, she was doing all the labor that comes with getting your work out into the world. She was his functional secretary and agent.

NR: That’s such an incredibly contemporary story as well—I think about the women I know whose writing lives have taken off after their divorce. Sylvia Plath, the original original divorcee!

EVD: I mean, I think in some ways she is, right? But I think that’s important, if we’re to go back to that question of mythmaking. I think if we told that story in that way after her death—that after Hughes left, she had this huge creative resurgence—maybe it would inspire other women writers, like, Well, maybe I should leave my layabout husband, or at least inspire them to wonder, How come you’re not filling out my Guggenheim applications, buddy?

But instead, the story gets told that she gambled by writing the poems that she did, because the subject matter was so dangerous and so risky. There’s this caveat added by Robert Lowell, that says, she’s a genius, she’s so great, but also it’s the particular nature of her genius that killed her. So I think that ends up acting like a warning shot to women artists, because she took that risk, ladies, and look at what happened.

NR: There’s one passage in particular, toward the end, where you write about Plath’s rage and what that meant for you, that I especially loved:

The incandescent rage that hallmarks Plath’s greatest work is the same anger that allowed me, in the years immediately following the end of a violent relationship, to rebuild my life. Plath taught me that I deserved that anger just as I deserved my life, that, contrary to popular notions of anger, especially in women, as a purely purely destructive passion, anger was a necessary tool for survival.

Could you talk about anger as a tool for survival?

EVD: If I hadn’t had the kind of rage that I did about what had happened to me, and also the way that I was received when I left this violent marriage, I don’t know that I would have made it. Because I had this background in women’s studies and feminist theory, and because I loved Plath, it was basically like, you do not get to do this to me.

I understood Plath as a survivor, which is ironic. She’s a person that was fighting all the time to liberate herself. First, from these sort of constraints of white, genteel middle class, highly-educated Massachusetts society. She was like, I can’t live like this. I can’t marry one of these people. I’ll die.

And that’s how she ends up with Hughes, which ends up also being kind of ironic because he’s so brutal at the end of their marriage, but in other ways it is a different life. It is the life that she was seeking, in marrying him, in moving to England, and being a freelance writer and being an artist as opposed to a teacher. I saw her as someone who was always trying to liberate herself. And that’s what the Ariel poems are, for me. She is liberating herself from a violent marriage. It’s such a buoyant, joyful act. Those poems are so funny and stark and weird and magical and fucking furious.

Rage can be such a productive tool. How do you fight back against these systems that are doing everything they can to constrain and silence, and sometimes erase you if you’re not angry about it? There has to be some kind of animating thing that gets you going every morning. And anger, when it’s being used in that regard, when it becomes a tool, can be really joyful. It can be a tool of reclamation, I think. It was for me.

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