Woolf and Plath Revised
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers &Writing WOOLF AND PLATH REVISED BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath have been cult figures to a generation of readers. Most of the books written about them in the last...
...Ariel Ascending, by contrast, concentrates on what Stanley Plumly in his essay speaks of as "the beauty and triumph of the range" she achieved...
...A. Alvarez' personal memoir tries to demythologize her suicide, claiming it was only a distress signal, "an attempt to exorcise the death she had summoned up in her poems...
...Others here, including Helen Vendler, Howard Moss, Joyce Carol Oates, John Frederick Nims, and Elizabeth Hardwick, similarly emphasize Plath's superb command of craft...
...The two revisionary studies at hand, however, focus on debts to tradition...
...One critic after another tries to associate Plath with favorite models: Hart Crane (Helen Vendler and Stanley Plumly...
...A telling vignette from To the Lighthouse has Lily Briscoe trying to capture her memory of Mrs...
...Vendler's insightful evaluation is clear-eyed about some artistic problems: "she veers from zero to one hundred like a dangerously swinging needle...
...to discern...
...Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, John Crowe Ransome (John Frederick Nims...
...or worse," I do not like the Jewish voice...
...Gordon sees the anxiety that permeates the novels at work in Virginia's periodic mad spells, too...
...If you have given upon Woolf—as I had—you may find yourself persuaded to reread her in the light of Lyndall Gordon's interpretation...
...In Virginia Woolf:A Writer'sL//e(Norton, 341 pp.,$17.95) Lyndall Gordon explores "the gap between the sociable Virginia Woolf of Bloomsbury...
...not up to the discipline" of her best work from "Blackberrying" to" Ariel," where language and formal control reached a lyric perfection...
...Gordon indulges in much special pleading...
...From today's vantage point it is apparent that the 1960s' and '70s' portraits of Woolf and Plath as victims of paternalistic society, or high priestesses of suicide, were drawn to suit the spirit of the times...
...Consequently, Sylvia Plath has been portrayed as the champion of feminist causes, even though in her life she was anything but a feminist...
...a wish to blend into the novel that extension of self through the kind of dream-like reverie to be found in Romantic poetry...
...and the experimental novelist...
...Too much of what passes for Plath criticism has been psychological ferreting into the despair that drove her to her death...
...Some readers still find her all surface, no substance...
...Her daughter's face had the same kind of dignity but it was more mobile, more vulnerable, a more exposed face, yet it shared with that of the mother a watchful passivity...
...Woolf was not overfond of the persona she created to entertain others: "I see through what I'm saying and detest myself, & wish for the other side of the moon...
...Gordon proposes "that Virginia Woolf s celebrated modernity was, in some ways, a jaunty overlay," and stresses " her unbroken ties with the 19th century...
...Woolf, though, may have lost more in the long run: Her novels and essays that have tended to titillate recent biographers—Mrs...
...Plumly dissents from popular taste by rejecting the last poems as "a little starved, anorectic...
...Not even her happy marriage to Leonard Woolf—which Gordon, who has seen their letters, thinks was more passionate than is generally acknowledged—could dispel her yearning for her parents' era...
...Both Woolf and Plath strove to be "modern...
...Dalloway, Orlando, "A Room of One's Own"—are also her most superficial efforts, bright but brittle...
...To pretend otherwise is disingenuous...
...She links Woolfs least attractive traits with her breakdowns and the need to protect her vulnerability...
...She put all the private force of feeling into the novels...
...as the ultimate confessional poet, even though she wrote in a highly subjective voice for only a small portion of her career...
...In any case, I am not certain that one can divide even so dissociated a personality as Woolfs into distinct parts...
...Paul Alexander, the editor of Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath (Harper& Row, 217 pp., S19.95), considers this collection "a sort of milestone to indicate a more appropriate way of regarding" the poet...
...Plath, especially, has suffered from autobiographicalinterpretationsofherwork...
...Indeed, such overcompensation is particularly evident in Ariel Ascending...
...she has none of the ravishing variety of tone that colors [George] Herbert's colloquies...
...Plath began as a traditionalist, and many critics now feel that she never quite broke away...
...the diary and letters, on the other hand, were tossed off with effervescent nonchalance...
...Wallace Stevens and Howard Nemerov (Joyce Carol Oates...
...Haunted by a being who half-possessed her, Virginia's childlike side longed to be possessed entirely, as the hero of a James novel actually becomes an ancestral portrait...
...Their low estimation is confirmed by the bitchiness of her letters and diaries (Lady Ottoline Morrell surrounded herself with young men "no bigger than asparagus...
...Nevertheless, Vendler demonstrates that Plath's poems, if not their creator, are life-affirming...
...Alvarez reminds us that Plath considered "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" "light poems...
...Describing the striking photograph on her volume's cover, Gordon asks: "When she tried on her mother's puffy, black Victorian dress, at the same time she was writing To the Lighthouse, was she the creative or the haunted heir...
...Furthermore, several of the too many pieces on The Bell Jar overstate its merits, straining to separate the story from Plath's life...
...In another vein, Plath peppered her writing with references to the horrors that preoccupied her post-World War II generation: Nazi death camps, Hiroshima, the electrocution of the Rosenbergs...
...But the tradition is also strong in Sylvia Plath—and taste, too, in the sense of craft utterly conquered and absorbed...
...But distasteful as the "public personality" may have been, we are urged, it allowed the buried self to create the masterpieces, To the Lighthouse and The Waves...
...Human figures become grotesques...
...The public personality outstares her...
...she is too wrapped up in her own case to generalize as Emily Dickinson could, and is the narrower for it...
...In "The Moon and the Yew Tree" (1961)," the complacency of the earlier poem is replaced by a distraught but tenacious appropriation of both the world" and Keats' more personal manner...
...Lyndall Gordon's Virginia Woolf is, in its subtle way, more radical thanAriel Ascending...
...Elizabeth Hardwick places Plath in the company of two immediate forebears: "In Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop we are never far away from the comic spirit, from tolerance and wisdom—qualities alien to the angry illuminations of A riel...
...Her prize-winning juvenilia of the' 50s glitters with wit, formal brilliance, a highly literary vocabulary—all the virtues of neo-Metaphysical verse...
...Bereft of Victorian faith—in God, in an afterlife, in Progress—Woolf floundered for other ways to animate existence...
...Gordon's book is really more a critical study than a biography...
...I do not like the Jewish laugh"—this from Leonard's wife...
...Most of the books written about them in the last decade have treated their lives—and suicides —as integral to their art...
...Yet her nostalgia for Wordsworth's "immortal sea" was overcast with pessimism...
...The other influences suggested seem present only in the eyes of the beholders...
...Plath deliberately imitated Thomas and Roethke for a while and a good case can be made for affinities with Crane...
...Gordon, too, dislikes that "Swiftian hatred of the human race," where "wit strains into hilarity...
...Helen Vendler examines how " when Plath began to find adequate language for her feelings, she redid a great number of her earlier themes...
...Hardwick sketches a family tree that allows us to appreciate Plath's kinship with the women poets of an earlier generation...
...Ramsey—a true "Angel in the house"—by painting a purple triangle...
...She is unsparing about the failure, in her opinion, of many of Woolf s novels...
...But the core is always there, in her marriage and in her best work which is never gushy, mercurial, malicious but poetic and searching and protected, in a sense, by the glittering carapace of the public act...
...In Julia Stephen there was a certain calm fixity as though a madonna mask was never removed...
...Precision interests her, and she is immensely learned like the other two poets, never wishing to be a 'natural' in any sense...
...It was a mistake, then, and out of it a whole myth has grown...
...Vendler sees "Metamorphoses of the Moon," a college poem, as" Audenesque, prematurely 'disillusioned,' and arch...
...Before the 1960s, when Quen-tin Bell's biography brought her to a wider audience as the Queen of Bloomsbury, an Edwardian novelist flanked by an eccentric cast of characters including the androgynous Lytton Strachey and VitaSackville-West, Woolf appealed mainly to purists interested in "style...
...It is only prudent to explore, therefore, to what extent Gordon's reconstruction of Woolfs private side or the essays about Plath's Romantic heritage may merely reflect a new conservatism...
...At the same time she does convincingly explain the finer nuances of the novels she admires...
...Quentin Bell gives a clearer picture of the whole life, and of his aunt as others saw her...
...Despite these flaws, Alexander's collection makes a number of valuable contributions...
...He believes she hoped to be saved, but "her calculations went wrong and she lost...
...Yet as Gordon observes, "This dark side, the subject of this biography, is hardest...
...A better than average first novel, it continues to be read primarily because it describes her initial suicide attempt...
...Her face was pale and anxious, her body too thin and awkward for the full-bodied, low-cut dress with its feminine flounces...
...Now two new appreciations attempt to correct the legends and uncover the artists in these women...
...She is convinced the much publicized "affair" with Vita was play-acting, to feed the vanity of both women...
...Much as Bloomsbury replaced Morris wallpaper with white paint and Chinese screens, the novelist shed psychological revelations about characters, a 19th-century device, and substituted patterns of action—culminating in the ebb and flow of The Waves...
Vol. 68 • January 1985 • No. 1
