The representation of women as writers in biography is an important topic to consider for what it reveals about feminist investments in, and uses of, the Romantic tradition. Especially interesting is the case of two antagonistic treatments of Sylvia Plath. Jacqueline Rose, in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, claims that she is not writing a biography, while Anne Stevenson, in Bitter Fame, writes a more traditional biography complicated by the involvement of the living members of the Plath estate. Though these authors use different methodological approaches for expressly different purposes – the latter attempting to detail the experiences of Plath’s life with a secondary focus on her poetry, and the former attempting to write almost to the exclusion of the events of her life – both present Plath in terms of the Romantic figure of the Artist. The use of such a figure invokes and encourages the emplotment of a life according to predetermined patterns and concepts that can be problematic when unacknowledged and unexamined. Through the comparison of the treatment of Plath and her work in the two books, the concepts of genius, disinterestedness, and transcendence emerge to reveal the indebtedness to the Romantic tradition. By examining this indebtedness, this paper seeks to examine some of the pitfalls in writing about women writers, expose the need for certain terms to be redefined and reconsidered, and briefly suggest some alternative biographical methods.

The concept of, and interest in, individual lives is an historical one and “dates in English letters [...] from the eighteenth century: certainly it was a harbinger of romanticism” (Edel 37). Biography, traditionally, is the recording of the true, linear narrative of one remarkable life, based on facts. Sharon O’Brien notes that the “model for biography is the nineteenth-century novel” with its realism situated in the belief that “language is a transparent medium capable of representing the world” (125). In opposition to conceptions of biography that are based on the premise of stable facts or a single truth, some feminist scholars such as Liz Stanley insist that “all knowledge is situated and is in fact knowledges” and that “‘objective knowledge’ is a logical impossibility” (“How Do We Know” 17). Texts written in acknowledgment of this plurality should also acknowledge “the centrality of reflexivity” and therefore produce “accountable knowledge [...] through writing open texts which can be investigated and reworked by active readers” (Stanley “How Do We Know” 18). Explaining within a biography the historical, political and theoretical positions that underpin a work, while opening it for discussion, is also a risk because it “defies dominant assumptions about the genre” (O’Brien), including the possibility of a neutral biographer. Biographers and their readers should be aware that “any biographer’s view is a socially located and necessarily partial one” (Stanley, Auto/biographical I 7). Other feminist challenges to traditional biography include the questioning of “the explanatory power of narrative, and [...] the self as a unified, knowable, and recoverable entity” (O’Brien 123), frequently based on postmodern theories.

The choice of biographical subject(s) is also of import to an understanding of the issues at stake in biographical writing. Barbara Caine notes that the “model of biography as the study of great and exceptional people makes women marginal, as only very few can ever fit into its framework. It reinforces the idea that only public achievement is significant and that those women who lead predominantly domestic lives are of no particular interest” (250). To contradict this exclusionary view some scholars have argued for biographies about women as a means of “reinscribing women in history” (O’Brien 128) as well as redefining what lives constitute an appropriate subject and which achievements are remarkable. Feminist biography is a combination of subject choice and methodology that addresses the issues of epistemology discussed above. The two biographies of Plath provide an example of a more realist, traditional biography and a deconstructionist, postmodern anti-biography that have striking points of convergence and thus illuminate some assumptions about biography that are difficult to jettison or even acknowledge.

The representation of Plath’s creative production reveals the underlying construction of the Artist or poet figure, a particularly interesting issue for Plath, who has attained mythic, or iconic, status. Does the end of her life determine the interpretation of her work as a writer? Her death is often portrayed as tragic, but that fact of her history does not necessarily determine a reading of her writing, notwithstanding the frequent connections made by critics. Despite the directly contradictory aims and oppositional positions assumed by Rose and Stevenson, both texts engage with the romanticizing of Plath for seemingly feminist reasons, especially regarding the construction of the canon, and the importance of the author as a gendered being. In her “New Preface” to Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson writes:

In stark contrast, Jacqueline Rose claims to be writing in opposition to conclusions and to undermine the idea of an objective view on the persona of Plath and her life. Rose writes that her book “is not a biography”(ix). She states she is

How, then, is Plath simply a textual entity? There is a mind behind the texts, not just that mind constructed by the texts – that of the persona – but rather one that is extra-textual, to which Rose feels that she has access. It is partially because of the continued importance of Plath’s compelling personality that Rose situates Plath in the Romantic tradition. There is a conflation of the persona(s) in the texts and the author behind them as was often the case with Romantic authors. The highly personal and revelatory nature of the poetry encourages the reader of Keats’s “When I Have Fears,” or “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” to feel let into the author’s mind. In a similar vein, Plath as textual persona and Plath as a woman compete in Rose’s book. Rose’s operating framework throughout her book

Raymond Williams observes, in his book Culture and Society: 1780-1950, that between the end of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, some significant shifts in the meaning of words occurred. One of the important words that underwent this shift was ‘art’ and with it, the conception of the artist changed dramatically. Williams notes that “Art came to stand for a special kind of truth, ‘imaginative truth’, and artist for a special kind of person” (15). Furthermore, the idea of the genius changed from “meaning ‘a characteristic disposition,’” to “mean ‘exalted ability’, and a distinction was made between it and talent” (Williams 15). So, a Romantic conception involved not only a new perspective on art, but also on the person and the abilities that created the art. The conception of the Romantic Artist developed into one in which the Artist “is by nature indifferent to the crude worldliness and materialism of politics and social affairs; he is devoted, rather, to the more substantial spheres of natural beauty and personal feeling” (Williams 48). While Williams goes on to explain that this view is a simplification of the interests and social engagement of the Romantic poets, elements of this view persist. It is also important to note Williams’s gendering of the Artist as male. The gender bias is not only a reflection of the conventions of the time in which his book was written, but also reveals some of the presuppositions underlying the Romantic tradition.

E. Young, in his 1759 work Conjectures on Original Composition, reveals another underlying concept: “An original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; Imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own” (qtd. in Williams 54). The idea of the original privileges the creativity and ‘liberty’ of work that breaks new ground and is spontaneous invention over work which is the result of effort and imitation. Rather than record the mundane, “the Artist’s business is to ‘read the open secret of the universe’” (Williams 56). The Artist has access to something universal and can transcend the ordinary through inspiration.

One potential reason for the use of the Romantic tropes of the Artist in work on Sylvia Plath is the many similarities between the lives the later Romantic poets led – lives of passion, pain, fame, ending in early death – and Plath’s experiences. The poets help to create their personal fame through their poetry, which was so personally revealing. The later Romantic poets – specifically Byron, Shelley and Keats – bear striking similarities to Plath. Byron was “made famous by his despair” and all three “die out of England” (McGann 110) as expatriates, like Plath who died away from America. The “Romantic poets like Keats appear to suffer in and through their work” (McGann 136) and the same could be said of Plath. Al Strangeways states that “Plath’s connection to Romantic tradition is [...] usually treated incidentally” and that this is inadequate because many of her “central conflicts [...] such as her struggles with individualism [...] and her interest in the extremes and intensities of the unconscious, are rooted in Romantic concerns and influenced by [a] Romantic version of conflict” (40). The trope of the suffering, tortured artist is frequent in Plath criticism, though less prevalent in Rose and Stevenson’s works. Byron’s death is also “normally thought of in relation to his marriage separation, but that domestic event merely culminated his desperate Years of Fame” (McGann 111). The observation applies equally well to Plath, a female addition to the tradition typically restricted to males, but this important idea of gender and inclusion in the canon will be returned to later in the paper.

A crucial concept for the discussion of Plath and her work is that of the ‘genius.’ Christine Battersby notes that

The concept of genius has historically been gendered as male. A man may possess female attributes, as “the genius was supposed to be like a woman: in tune with his emotions, sensitive, inspired – guided by instinctual forces that welled up from beyond the limits of rational consciousness” (Battersby 103), but not be a woman. The tendency has been to construct the genius in such a way that women do not, or cannot, conform. Historically, a “woman who created was faced with a double bind: either to surrender her sexuality (becoming not masculine but a surrogate male), or to be feminine and female, and hence to fail to count as a genius” (Battersby 3). One of the essentialist explanations is put forward by Andrew Gemant who writes, the “lack of female geniuses” can be explained by fact that “[w]omen are known to be eminently practical, [...][a] woman’s mind tends to the concrete,” and the “prime trust [of reproduction] occupies much of woman’s mind from earliest girlhood to late years, leaving little time and opportunity for so-called idle thoughts and occupation” (112). This argument is one of many that explain the incompatibility of women and genius. Feminists have struggled against this, but it seems that much of the effort has been directed at inserting female examples of genius into the canon rather than undermining or reevaluating the conception of a genius and the gender biases it has included and still does include. “Romanticism linked genius to a type of personality, and to concomitant (non-conscious) modes of creative process” (Battersby 104) which have not been effectively challenged. McGann claims that there is still “ a standard of poetic excellence that is based upon our current, late-Romantic ideas about what poetry is and ought to do” (71). That standard is used quite explicitly in Stevenson’s biography and more subtly in Rose’s work.

The idea of genius also has a long history of association with madness. George Becker, in his book The Mad Genius Controversy, states that further “proof for the association of genius and madness was provided by the numerous instances of self-labeling, particularly common among the Romantic poets” (55). Gemant explains that “the genius bears some relation to insanity, otherwise it could not be explained by what means he is able to genuinely produce works of a distinctly abnormal character” (104). Battersby notes that “Sylvia Plath’s suicide might be popularly viewed as confirming her ‘genius’ by proving that she lived in the psychic no-man’s land between sanity and madness” (103), but it seems that this view holds a certain amount of influence beyond the ‘popular view.’ Stevenson structures her biography as one of a genius, defined in part, by Plath’s death. The end determines what precedes it. As Kenneth Burke writes, “a history’s end is a formal way of proclaiming its essence or nature” (13), and Plath’s life becomes a tragedy because of its conclusion.

Stevenson’s biography uses the framework of the genius, a unique personality, as a structure as well as an explanation for Plath’s poetic achievements.[2] Plath was born a marked individual. In her opening chapter, “The Girl Who Wanted to Be God,” Stevenson chronicles the early recognition by family and teachers of Plath’s “lyric gift beyond the ordinary” (1), and explains that a pattern of behaviour, of Plath’s deep feelings, overreaction, and self-dramatizing, began at a young age. At one point, Stevenson explicitly evokes the Romantic tradition in relation to Plath: “At seventeen she was already caught up in the hapless dualism of the Romantics; already she apprehended that she ‘never, never, never’ would attain the perfection she longed for in ‘my paintings, my poems, my stories.’ They were all poor reflections” (16). What Stevenson is not explicit about is her own investment in situating Plath in the Romantic tradition, her use of the tradition as an underlying structure. For Stevenson, the shape of Plath’s life is predetermined, doomed by her own personal life myth, which involved a tragic and over-developed self-importance. She writes that “[h]er death was part of the pattern she believed she could not escape” (297). Stevenson quotes Dr. Horder on the reasons for Plath’s suicide: “Was it the irresponsibility of the artist? No, that is so limited an explanation as to be nearly ridiculous. I believe [...] that she was deeply depressed, ‘ill,’ ‘out of her mind’ and that any explanations of a psychological sort are inadequate” (298). Death by reason of being an artist is still the first suggestion, though dismissed, and his use of quotation marks around ‘ill’ is interesting. All of his suggestions are qualified and undermined somewhat, maintaining an element of mystery. Stevenson seems to decide that the tragic plot can best describe Plath’s death, as “at the end of her life [Plath was] both the dramatist and the tragic heroine of her ‘murderous art’ [...] [She] is both heroine and author; when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her own plot” (298). Her suicide is part of the tragic Artist self she has created.[3] The tragedy of her suicide is one of the reasons for Plath’s championing by some feminists. Though Stevenson goes to some lengths to show Plath’s darker side and complicity in the pain of her life, she does not abandon her construction of Plath as Artist, only complicates it. Plath is an Artist because of her particularly constructed relationship to her work.

Using Ted Hughes’s analysis of the teleology of Plath’s writing, Stevenson asserts that the Ariel poems were the epitome of her career.[4] Those poems, “[w]ritten from the depths again [...] began to fill with her unique imagery. She was closing in on her mind’s light as she had not before, and her grasp of this unearthly illumination was by now masterly, her armory of poetic techniques impressive, the voice completely her own – her mature voice” (229). Stevenson describes Plath as then conforming much more closely to the construction of the Romantic artist, working by her mind’s light and unearthly inspiration. The progression in Plath’s work continues as the poetry rises “above private iconography to become universal” (234). Stevenson writes of the production of the Ariel poems that “her muse…[was] with her” and that

It is an internal crisis that brings about the Ariel poems, another example of Plath’s egotism that is to be expected as her poetry is always about her self. Stevenson explains, “[a]t Yaddo the key to her puzzle at first evaded Sylvia. It was to be some time before she fully realized the nature of the genius within, struggling to get out. Only then could she abandon her envied models and sing the song of herself alone, under her bell jar” (Stevenson 167). Plath is a genius, but she must struggle to move from the realm of imitation, of models, into the realm of real inspiration and the creation of original work, breaking new ground. Yet Stevenson retracts some of her assertion of Plath’s Romanticism when she writes, “[w]ith long years of patient, disciplined effort at her craft, Sylvia Plath was able to forge a universal art and transform crippling disability into exalted achievement” (303). Stevenson both asserts and undercuts her genius – asserting it with the mention of universal art and exalted achievement, but undercutting it with the emphasis on the effort and the reference to her craft. Historically, a craft was associated with talent and performed by an artisan, a class below the Artist, who produced Art, though, in the Modernist period ‘craft’ increasingly became associated with Art and this changed the definition of literary genius. Plath’s early poetry is criticized by some scholars because one could tell, according to Langdon Hammer, “[h]ere is someone who has obviously studied poetry (to whom, in that sense, it didn’t come naturally), writing it, and writing it like someone who studied it in school” (64). However, Williams also makes the claim that Romantic genius was not incompatible with discipline and effort and that this view of genius “is at once more rational and more useful for the making of art than the emphasis, at least as common in Romantic pamphleteering, on an ‘artless spontaneity’” (61). Plath’s work, then, coincides with the more realistic Romantic view.

In Bitter Fame the relationship between Plath’s life and work is one of fairly straightforward autobiographical recording. Stevenson explains that the “poet in Sylvia reduced that time [of her father’s death] to a figure in a delicately constructed work of art – a ship in a bottle, described at the end of her radio script ‘Ocean 1212-W’” (12). When Stevenson encounters a period for which there are “no journals to take the reader step by step [...] over the grounds of her development, we must rely upon the work itself” (236) to reveal the events of her life. The poetry works as a substitute for journal entries, again emphasizing the autobiographical relationship and close connection between the poetry and the life. Plath’s works do not only describe past events, however. Stevenson reads certain texts as prophetic, descriptions of events yet to come. Since Plath’s “self-analysis is profound and so detached [...] one can see in her writing a blueprint for what would occur” (15). Stevenson also makes use of a perceived pattern of growth and transcendence over the course of Plath’s life and career. Her “true subject was this inner self,” claims Stevenson, “not her outer experiences and achievements. Eventually she would yearn to kill her false self so that her real one might burn free of it” (23). Stevenson later records that with “‘Event’ and ‘The Rabbit Catcher,’ the scenario for all she wrote of her marriage until her death was set. She was making her self-justifying and unforgiving case in much the same terms as henceforth she would use to sow ‘the seeds of the myth of her martyrdom’” (245). This reading highlights the constructed nature of Plath’s life’s meaning according to her myth and implies that Plath was rewriting herself to conform to an artistic plot, one similar to the tragic lives of the later Romantic poets. According to A. Alvarez, Plath’s poems and journals “conspire to give her early death the ‘illusion of a Greek necessity’” (qtd. in Stevenson 303). Explanations seem inadequate, but the literary analogy, Plath as first a poet with poetic sensibilities, wins out for the interpretation of her end, in the end. Rose, contrarily, applies, “at least partly” psychoanalytic theory, to understand the “terms of Plath’s death – suicide as an act of violence, as Freud put it, which is always aimed at more than one person” (96). Psychoanalysis is useful for Rose, to an extent, for understanding her final act, and it is noteworthy that Rose does not omit the suicide, the act of a woman, not a text. The action also has an impact on the meaning for Rose of the work Plath left behind.

Invoking the relation between madness, genius, and art, Stevenson describes Plath’s writing in terms of a healing process. The act of creation was a struggle, but a productive one:

Other elements of the Romantic tradition more consistently underlie her arguments. Rose makes a connection between Plath and her culture that is similar to the connection McGann makes between the work of the later Romantic poets and their societal context. McGann writes that “Shelley’s idealism, Byron’s sensationalism, and Keats’s aesthetic poetry are all displaced yet fundamental vehicles of cultural analysis and critique” (117). Plath’s poetry has faced charges of extremism (or praise for the same characteristics) as well as of escapism. Rose performs a similar sort of recovery and cultural grounding to McGann’s, showing how the personal is cultural in Plath’s work. McGann states, “[t]he grand illusion of Romantic ideology is that one may escape such a world through imagination and poetry. The great truth of Romantic work is that there is no escape, that there is only revelation” (131). Rose states that in Plath’s poetry, “poetic writing, inspiration, higher knowledge, rely on a transforming vision which is a snare. Each time the poet fails in that vision – because she is inadequate to it, or because she passes alongside it to somewhere else, or because she seems to judge, to take her distance, from those who seek it” (115). What Rose seems to set up, but does not acknowledge, is that this conception of poetry fits very well within the Romantic tradition. The “Romantic Imagination does not save, it offers [...] a tragic understanding. And for the Romantic poet, the best and worst knowledge it brings is the critique of the ideology upon which Romantic poetry is itself founded” (McGann 132). For Rose, Plath too undermines the positions and concepts she establishes in her poetry. McGann looks at the figure of Byron as an outsider, as a “gadfly and critic of his own age and culture” (137). According to Rose, Plath critiques patriarchy, holding up much of her world for criticism. Rose states that she reads “Plath as a type of analyst of her critics and culture alike” (Rose 10); Rose’s own analysis of Plath is not outside of ideology, and in this case, it is, at least in part, Romantic ideology.

Rose refers to her subject as ‘she’ or as ‘Plath’ rather than the more conversational ‘Sylvia,’ as in Stevenson’s text. According to Rose, Plath “is neither one identity, nor multiple identities simply dispersing themselves. She writes at the point of tension – pleasure/danger, our fault/my fault, high/low culture – without resolution or dissipation of what produces the clash between the two” (10). Rose contributes to a feminist reclamation of ignored aspects of Plath’s persona and writing, based on an investment in the assertion of importance of ‘low culture,’ the typically feminine, and the popular. Williams notes that in the Romantic period there was a “different habitual attitude towards the ‘public’” (51), one of disdain. Rose’s treatment of Plath and her audience begins with a similar premise, though Rose dismantles certain assumptions regarding the public and the popular. She reveals Plath’s awareness of her audience, her ambitious magazine writing, and defends her against claims of ‘careerism,’ a crime against typical conceptions of ‘high art.’ The Romantic period saw “the rejection of the Public and Popularity as standards of worth” (Williams 52), even as Romantic poets also had to negotiate the market. Romantic artists began to place an emphasis “on the special nature of the art-activity as a means to ‘imaginative truth’, and, second, an emphasis on the artist as a special kind of person” (53) as, at least in part, a reaction against the commodification of writing in the age beyond patronage. Rose shows how Plath participates in that market and attempts to undo some of the denigration involved in the lack of disinterestedness. Stevenson notes, too, the money earned by Plath as well as the importance she placed on her earnings, relating, among other things, the list she sent to her mother detailing the “$470 Total, plus much joy!” (58), which she earned in 1955. For Stevenson, though, these earnings and the work she was doing at this period are characterized as lesser achievements, work of the ‘false self’ of which Plath was not yet able to rid herself. She was not yet a ‘true’ Romantic, scorning the marketplace, at least publicly, and dealing in universals.

Rose notes how critics, such as A. Alvarez, place “Plath along with Robert Lowell, at the forefront of a new movement of poetry which he calls ‘Extremism.’ [Alvarez] sets this movement against what he sees as the middle-class [...] the last bastion against a general cultural mediocrity” (21). It is, therefore, high culture. Rose wants to trouble this exclusive association for feminist ends. As she notes, “the denigration of popular culture carries with it a specific denigration of women” (167), so her re-reading of Plath as a writer of popular fiction works to combat the patriarchal hierarchy of ‘high’ poetry over ‘low’ popular writing. Rose critiques Plath criticism that overlooks the less exalted predecessors for her work, suggesting that because popular writers “fall outside the high cultural lineage most often established for Plath” (189), they are ignored. Writers such as Olive Higgins Prouty and Jean Stafford “embarrass that image of Plath as the glorious, isolate apogee of the woman writer’s self-realization in the domain of high art” (Rose 189). Rose works to unsettle the general trend in criticism that upholds the Romantic standards for Plath and criticize her when she deviates from them.

Rose documents the “difficult aesthetic question” in feminist criticism which

Though Rose claims to write without recourse to facts and to the ‘real’ people involved in the Plath story, she is unable to maintain her discussion at the textual level. The fact that Plath died intestate and her literary estate passed to her husband is significant for Rose because of the editing decisions Hughes made with regard to Plath’s work, but the discussion here at least begins with facts and the actions of real people rather than X and Y. In mentioning that that Plath was a pacifist Rose again invokes the politics of the subject and the extra-textual life. The slippage is perhaps even more significant when it relates to the mind of Plath beyond her works, evident when Rose attempts to reconstruct her intentions through an analysis of various drafts of poems. Rose analyzes drafts of “The Rabbit Catcher” as well the final version of the poem to reveal the way Plath altered the text, taking out references that were most personal (141). Rose, when reading a first draft of a poem, projects herself into Plath’s mind. Rose instructs the reader: “Note too that crossed-out ‘I imagined’ – she is imagining it, it is really there” (141). The reconstruction of Plath’s thoughts during the writing process is problematic for a reading that purports to be only a textual examination; it has moved to the realm of authorial intention and the author’s mind. Rose also proposes that it is “as if [Plath] were almost rewriting it, we could say, against or in anticipation of the readings to come” (142). This proposal seems to conjure up the author, suggesting why she wrote what she did rather than what writing independently can do, and asserts the importance of the woman behind the text. Though this may be valid critical technique, it is strikingly at odds with Rose’s explicit project. By using drafts to get at the writer behind the text, to attempt to have recourse to her mind, Rose reveals that her work is not just at the level of the texts. As Langdon Hammer notes,

Rose also constructs Plath, as well as her works, as allowing for significant insight into the Holocaust in a way that gives Plath a privileged status. Rose writes, “If, therefore, the Holocaust appears as historical reference only in the last years of Plath’s writing, the delay is coincident with the memory of the survivors themselves. Her tardiness mimics, or chimes in with, their own” (216). Rose implies that Plath, attuned to culture, is able to express its depths through her poetry, whether she is aware of all she is accomplishing or not. This view of Plath coincides with the idea of the Artist as inspired and even controlled by nature and culture. The genius is guided by “the ‘universal’ and the needs of the species [...] he has an ego which he surrenders to an external control. And this outside force is not just ‘nature’ [...] but includes, also, civilisation, culture” (Battersby 109). Thus, the poet contains something universal, something that all people have some share in, but to a greater, or exceptional degree, with an increased capacity for expression. Rose argues that if Plath “is a ghost of our culture, therefore, it is above all because of what she leads that culture to reveal about itself” (6). Her persona, as with her work, creates meaning beyond its original time and context in a way that is useful for contemporary cultural understanding. One could, perhaps, argue the same for almost any figure, but not all achieve the status that Plath has. Plath is, then, something exceptional. Rose explains that “Plath has been made into an emblem for the flight of poetry—poetry as the expression of a transcendent selfhood, poetry as rising above the dregs of the culture which it leaves behind” (8). Although she critiques the limitations of that view, insisting that Plath “also writes – and very often prefers to write – low prose” (9), Rose’s own argument ultimately reinforces the idea of Plath’s Romantic-style transcendence.

The Romantic tradition places importance on who speaks, as “Romantic poetry places the individual at the determining center of the human world” (McGann 132). Rose and Stevenson both work from a position that centres on Plath. It is her psyche, her exploration of themes, and her social positioning that is part of the foundation of both books. Though Stevenson’s is more linearly biographical, and Rose’s is more theoretically complex, both focus on the body of work related to Sylvia Plath and on the mind behind that work. In this way they both coincide with more traditional biography. Foucault describes the “task of criticism” in “What is an Author?” as “not to bring out the work’s relationships with the author, not to reconstruct through the text as thought or experience, but rather, to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form and the play of its internal relationships” (891). While this seems in keeping with the project Rose has laid out, she brings in the thoughts of the author, when she analyzes the drafts of poems. Though “[p]ost-structuralists assure us that the author is dead, adding their voices to previous generations of Marxist critics who have undermined the authority and isolation of the lone author” still, “in popular culture we find the old vocabulary, and the figure of the artist as hero, as alive and well as ever” (Battersby 15). So too, in much of academic writing is the old vocabulary alive and well. There are scholars who are working with alternative models for biographic study, however. One alternative is offered by Barbara Caine who suggests seeking “another kind of approach to biography which allows individual cases to illuminate the lot of all women of a particular time, place and social group” (247). Other ways to avoid the “falsely unified or essential self” include “incorporating into the text a record of the shifts and developments in [the biographer’s] own construction of the subject” or considering the multiple “‘subject positions’ in a life [...] without discarding a focus on gender” (O’Brien 130). Stanley mentions meta-biographies “that include the biographer and the process of researching” (Auto/biographical I 249) and suggests that biographies could also be written according to anti-realism principles which “disrupt[...] chronology and periodisation” as well as gender, and “confound[...] the certainties of the reader” (252).

Rose and Stevenson both mention feminist uses of Plath and respond to them; however, neither woman is very explicit about her own feminist investments, especially regarding the use of the Romantic tradition. Stevenson observes that

Rose notes how Holbrook, along with other critics, utilizes the “all too familiar stereotype of the feminist as failed woman” (19). Some of the work that Rose’s book performs asserts the femininity in Plath, as well as elements of masculinity, to reveal her embodiment of characteristics typically associated with both genders, thus making her a new type of admirable figure. Plath may be androgynous, but she cannot be so to the extent that her femaleness is lost sight of, and, thus, there is tension. Unlike Gertrude Stein, who constructed herself “in ways that corresponded to prevailing myths of masculine genius,” which “has created problems for many feminist critics” (Elliott and Wallace 99), Plath embraced elements of the masculine genius along with femininity. She was a wife, a mother, an exceptional cook and homemaker; she wrote popular fiction. While “the modernist female artist was caught in an impossible bind since representing herself as a woman meant renouncing her claim to originality” (Elliott and Wallace 111), Plath, according to Rose and Stevenson, was able to claim to be both a woman and an original artist. It is important that she was a woman, and also that she is an important writer. Rose attempts to work in the tradition of the androgynous author as well as in the tradition of feminist authorship. It is not irrelevant for Rose that Plath can be read as anti-patriarchal, nor that she was married to Ted Hughes and that he edited her poetry.

When Rose discusses the lure of death in Plath’s poetry she states, “we might note that this association has a fully accredited literary tradition that runs from William Shakespeare to the surrealism of Georges Bataille. We would not want to rest Plath’s authority on such a parade of male writers, but there is a history of poetic meaning and cultural affiliation present to this poem” (140). This quotation reveals the tension between the traditional canon and the feminist rejection of the authority of that tradition. Rose invokes Shakespeare and Bataille to legitimize what Plath accomplished, asserting Plath’s right to be listed along with them, but then undercuts her own claim by stating that her authority should not rest on her affinity to male writers. Her attempt is to insert Plath into the canonical tradition of writers, asserting she is one of the ‘important’ authors, and yet to say that she does her own thing, and should be valued according to deconstructed standards. Plath is a female Romantic with a twist; her affinity with canonical authors is both unimportant criteria and a source of legitimacy and this bind should be more fully discussed.

While Romanticism seems a valid concern for studies of literary influence on Plath, the connection between Plath herself, her persona, and the Romantic tradition remains to be fully explored. Even if Plath’s poetry invokes the Romantic tradition, this does not necessarily explain why Rose and Stevenson would use that tradition to discuss the author. The use of Romantic concepts and patterns is not necessarily in and of itself troubling; it is the seeming unawareness of its influence and the lack of authorial acknowledgement of it that is of concern. If biography is “reflexively concerned with its own production” and explicitly states the assumptions and convictions at work, it can open up “biographical and other feminist research processes for scrutiny by readers” (Stanley, “Process” 118) and encourage engagement. The case of the two Plath biographies offers a way into the questions of what biographies can and should do. Rather than succumbing to predetermined emplotment or attempting to deny the lived experience of an artist, biographers might openly and explicitly engage with and debate the terms and patterns of the Romantic tradition. Terms such as ‘genius’ might be redefined to encompass a different understanding of gender and artistic production.

One possible alternative to the Romantic tradition is the irrelevance of the author, but there are dangers, especially for some feminists, in doing away with the writing subject. As both Stevenson and Rose have shown, Plath, both as a woman and given the conditions of her life, could not be forgotten in a biography, or even in “not a biography.” It may be difficult to conceive of an artist, and Plath in particular, from outside the ideology of Romanticism, but there are alternative conceptions of the artist from the Early Moderns to the Modernists. The problem of unacknowledged indebtedness can be remedied not only by the acknowledgement and comment on the historical tradition, but also by more fundamental reconsiderations of the genre. Biographies might organize themselves according to topics, as Hermione Lee does in her biography of Virginia Woolf, thereby undermining the chronology of a life from birth to death and unsettling typical patterns. Aggregate biographies are also possible, such as Caine’s Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family. Biographies of this type remove the focus from one individual, increasing the significance of the context and the interconnectedness of lives. With an expanded scope, biography can be a point of entry into a time and place rather than just the story of one life. Biographies can also include self-reflective commentary on the genre as well as consideration of the biographer’s biases, methods, and experiences of production. However, without acknowledging the underlying concepts that shape the understanding of a life, an artist’s life, and the life’s relation to artistic production the use of other models will not be possible. Unacknowledged debts curtail the discussion of what else biographies might do.