Revisiting Plath and Her Cultural Afterlife at 50

Published: January 1st, 2014

Category: Blog

ElizabethWinderMB2This academic year I offered fall courses to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death and her novel, The Bell Jar. (My last Plath course coincided with the U.S. publication of Unabridged Journals, an experience I wrote about in an article for the journal Pedagogy.) In “Sylvia Plath and Her Cultural Afterlife,” students explored her poems, fiction, and journals in conjunction with her media image, including Christine Jeffs’s film Sylvia (in which a pre-Bond Daniel Craig plays Ted Hughes). The web gave us ready access to ongoing critical and popular conversations about Plath, especially the online journal Plath Profiles and Sylvia Plath Info Blog.

A highlight was our October visit from Elizabeth Winder, author of the most poetic book about Plath this anniversary year—Pain, Parties, Work. My students were drawn to the book’s artful reconstructions of Plath’s material world of fashion and femininity in the summer of 1953, the year of her Mademoiselle internship. Afterward, Elizabeth and I discussed our sense that the current generation of college students may very well be Plath’s ideal readers. Their understanding of sexuality and gender identity often yields a Plath more contemporary than conflicted, more mainstream than extreme. The men defended her from sensation journalism as ardently as the women did. And the women saw the collegiate Plath as someone like them. Teaching an entire course on Plath brings a level of intensity to the classroom that most subjects just don’t. It also fuels students’ creativity. Plath proves a most powerful Muse, disquieting as that may be. –MB

 

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