Romanticizing Sylvia Plath: Feminism and Literary Biography

Abstract

Reading literary biographies, and particularly the biographies of women who were writers, raises important questions about how to understand literary productions and what relationship that work has to a life. Two biographies of Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevensonââ¬â¢s Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath and Jacqueline Roseââ¬â¢s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, propose to interpret her work and its relationship to her life in fundamentally different ways, and yet what is striking is the underlying indebtedness to the Romantic tradition of the Artist in both books. The concept of ââ¬Ëgenius,ââ¬â¢ closely associated with the Romantic tradition, invokes gender as the historical definition of ââ¬Ëgeniusââ¬â¢ excludes women. Stevensonââ¬â¢s more traditional biography seeks to explain Plathââ¬â¢s poetry through Romantic tropes, inserting Plath into the tradition, while Rose proposes to discuss Plathââ¬â¢s textual being only. In Roseââ¬â¢s text the relation of Plathââ¬â¢s work to the Romantic tradition is more complex and Roseââ¬â¢s biography engages in a contradiction when it still invokes the significance of the woman behind the texts, a move necessary in part for feminist reasons. For both authors, feminist investment is in conflict with the unacknowledged Romantic ideology shaping their texts. Both authors challenge the Romantic tradition but do not ultimately undermine it. The use of the Romantic tradition in relation to Plath opens the discussion up to larger questions regarding the criteria used to value work, the figure of the artist, and how literary work is produced.