A conversation with scholar Emily Van Duyne by Nels P. Highberg
In Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation (W.W. Norton and Co., July 2024), professor and scholar Emily Van Duyne shatters the mythic image of Sylvia Plath: that the poet was a doomed genius whose life had been forever haunted by death. Van Duyne’s work brings renewed attention to the misogyny lurking beneath this apocryphal legend, which had developed in post-mortem portrayals of Plath after her suicide in 1963. In her death’s aftermath, she ceased being a complex human and instead became a blank canvas for the projections of others, particularly her estranged husband, Ted Hughes. What Van Duyne’s work shows, instead, is a writer committed to the struggle for her artistry and a woman dedicated to her family while fighting for her own survival.
Van Duyne’s book builds on an argument mapped out in a groundbreaking 2020 LitHub article. It insists we see Plath’s suicide as one part of her complicated life. Plath started the summer of 1953 guest-editing for Mademoiselle in New York with an elite group of university women. By summer’s end, a deep depression led to a suicide attempt, an experience whose survival and treatment inspired her iconic novel The Bell Jar. She studied at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met Hughes. Her career as a poet flourished, and she adored becoming a mother to two children. But her marriage grew increasingly troubled as Plath endured abuse and adultery on the part of Hughes. After separating in 1962, Plath wrote many poems for her collection, Ariel.
These poems would only come to us posthumously. Their publication, and their critical reception, would be significantly shaped by Hughes. Despite his brutal treatment of Plath, Hughes and Plath were still legally married at the time of her death, so Hughes became Plath’s literary executor after her suicide. Until his own death in 1998, Hughes exerted intense control over Plath’s memory. Vast archives of previously unpublished materials, which scholars like Van Duyne have excavated since 1998, have made Hughes’s control obvious. With the release of Loving Sylvia Plath, readers can delve into Van Duyne’s revelatory findings from years of scrutinizing decades of such material to create a work Publisher’s Weekly has called “[a]n incriminating account exposing the depths of Hughes’s cruelty.”
Our conversation spans her deep dive into Harriet Rosenstein’s unfinished Plath biography, the delicate art of sourcing in literary scholarship, and how this project reshaped Van Duyne’s teaching of writing as a critical act.
NPH: I wanted to start with the beginning and your title. Why do you call it a reclamation?
EVD: There are several things about Plath that I wanted to rethink and potentially reclaim. One is to upset a dichotomy that implies you cannot be someone who survives violence, particularly intimate partner violence, and also be a strong person. Two, the historical discourse about Plath created by the second-wave feminist movement made her into a helpless creature who had been abused and martyred by Hughes. It’s all so inaccurate regarding the complicated portraits of survivors that emerge.
NPH: What counts as expertise when writing about Sylvia Plath today?
EVD: I love that question. People tend to split themselves up with Plath, where you have some people who are experts on her biography, and you must have hardcore street cred to say you’re an expert because there’s so much material. She’s one of the most detailed keepers of a day-to-day existence. People tend to overlook or underestimate how hard it is to know Sylvia Plath’s life because there’s such an archive. That can get tiresome. At different conferences in Plath Studies, I’ve seen how that can lead to a tendency to be pedantic. If you make the smallest mistake, there are people there to jump down your throat and be like, you know, on July 14th, 1950, she did have steak for breakfast. It can pigeonhole us regarding how we think about her. You’re talking about a woman with the most extraordinary imagination and for whom fantasy played an important role in her work. Let’s also let the spirit of that infuse our thinking about Plath.
What is most interesting about Plath is how you don’t have to limit it to a new critical approach or just her biography. I am never arguing that any given poem is about one specific event. All of our imaginative work is informed by the lives that we lead and the experiences that we have. It’s just this constant ebb and flow with Plath’s writing, where she’s pulling on this thing that happened to her, but then she’s taking it into all these other extraordinary places. How do you go to those exceptional places with her and return to that life?
NPH: Can you say a bit about the explosion in Plath studies over the last decade and how you, as a writer, managed all of this?
EVD: We’ve seen an explosion over the last twenty-five years. Ted Hughes [Plath’s husband] died in 1998. Almost immediately after his death, we have a huge release of primary materials by Plath that people have only read in archives. We got the unabridged journals in 2000. Frieda Hughes, their daughter, is responsible for that. Plath studies changed forever because suddenly you had her unadulterated voice on the page for more than four hundred pages. We had a similar thing happen with the publication of the two volumes of her letters in 2017 and 2018. Then, the Harriet Rosenstein archival materials became available at Emory University in 2020. Plath’s letters to Ruth Beuscher [Plath’s psychiatrist during her stay at Mclean Hospital in 1953] are the most valuable of the Rosenstein papers.
[Those letters are] 30,000 words of brand-new material forever altering how we see her. It forever alters the way we see the Ariel poems, it forever alters our understanding of her relationship with Ted Hughes, and it forever alters our understanding of Ted Hughes himself because the Hughes being described in those letters bears no resemblance to the public face of Hughes we got for like thirty years after Plath’s death.
It takes us a long time to absorb that stuff. That’s thrilling to me because it means there’s more and more and more there that we can go back to and more that we can glean. There’s so much more to learn, and that’s wonderful. It takes a long time for people to absorb those things culturally, and the processing produces the best writing.
You can flat-out miss stuff. Linda Wagner-Martin, the Plath biographer and wonderful scholar generally, is in her 80s. I emailed her in 2021 with a simple and specific question about something I had come across in the archives. We had a great conversation. At the end of it, she said, I’m going to send you a box of treasures, and she mailed me an envelope full of letters and photographs she had held onto. There was an original letter from Dr. John Horder, Plath’s doctor in England at the end of her life. I read that letter forty times.
I brought the packet to Greece while on a Fulbright [teaching about Plath at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki]. I knew I was going to see Plath scholar Gail Crowther. After a Plath symposium in Greece, we’re looking at the ocean and Gail’s reading all the letters. I wanted her to be able to handle the material physically. She finishes, she looks at me, and she’s shocked by Horder’s letter because he says Plath was a complex suicide–meaning she used two distinct, lethal methods together. The letter confirms Plath had also taken sleeping pills in addition to asphyxiating on gas from the oven. I’m like, what‽ I did not pick up on it. It’s not just about the massive amount of material itself but how you categorize, think through, and share it with your friends.
NPH: When I read about that letter in your book, I closed it and shed some tears, partly because it’s a clear, logical explanation for her death. This is a person who suffered from a medical condition. An estranged marriage and extreme isolation greatly exacerbated it as she had just moved with her two small children into an apartment without a telephone as a snowstorm paralyzed London. But it was ultimately an illness, one with which she had struggled for much of her life.
EVD: It makes her so human, like all the rest of us, right? The whole tenor of everything that came out about her for so long was that she was inhuman or superhuman. She was so strange, and she was a witch or a monster. She was a spoiled child gambling with her life. No, she was just in agony. And when you look at all the evidence, it makes sense why.
NPH: Talking about details that get overshadowed, one I learned from you and have held onto for years is Hughes saying in a letter that he had a dream where Hitler told him to leave Plath, and that’s part of why he did. That is a verifiable fact: he says he listened to Hitler. But scholars do not discuss what this admission means regarding Hughes’s ethics or stability or his marriage with Plath. For Hughes, they just let it go.
EVD: For that to be published in his selected letters seventeen years ago, there’s nothing in any reviews about it. That’s so egregious! Again, you end up with incomplete pictures. Plath is pathologized for biting Hughes on the cheek and drawing blood the night they met when she was twenty-three. In their thirties as parents, Hughes was the person whose behavior had radically changed. And she was writing that to so many people, but critics weren’t listening.
NPH: Let’s discuss methods for writing about a vast and controversial archive. I know there are always legal issues surrounding quotations of published and unpublished materials. You have to be selective in your choices.
EVD: So many biographies of Plath have been criticized for their use of paraphrasing. Having now gone through this process, anyone that criticizes any biography for relying on paraphrasing is an asshole because [permissions are] so expensive, and so many of these people are dead. I desperately wanted to have a picture of the letter from Dr. Horder because it was so moving. Well, we couldn’t find him. I was writing to every medical journal in England asking for any contact. I know he had children. Where are they? You wouldn’t think that it would be so hard in this day and age, but it was. And there’s the issue with Plath and Hughes: Frieda Hughes is the executor of her mother’s estate, but Carol Hughes – his wife at the time of his death – is the executor of Ted Hughes’s estate.
I used fair use as much as possible, which worked for some things. There is a good balance between direct quotation and paraphrasing, and it is possible to make paraphrasing work. The fair use legal limit is 300 words from a published book. If you’re quoting one letter, it’s forty words from a letter. That was less limiting with the unpublished archival material. I could quote forty words from each of these unpublished Ted Hughes letters. Plaths, with few exceptions, have been published. It turns into three hundred words from the first volume of letters and three hundred words from the second volume. It’s a balancing act to be intellectually and ethically responsible while working within legal and financial limits.
NPH: How has working on this book influenced your teaching of writing?
EVD: I teach critical writing. I don’t teach creative writing. I teach a huge swath of kinds of writing because I’ll teach first-year composition, but I’ll also teach the senior writing seminar. I also teach in the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies minor at Stockton, so I teach a lot of feminist criticism and feminist theory. In this book, I’ve written a comprehensive argument that’s multidisciplinary, multifaceted, and incorporates a great deal of research, so it models many kinds of writing I teach. But writing this book was so hard. It’s humbling and made me a better teacher because I now have more empathy for writers.
NPH: What would you like to see next regarding Plath studies?
EVD: I’ve recently seen this explosion of imaginative literature about Plath, and I’ve loved it, like But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu. She teaches at the University of Melbourne and wrote a novel that’s a meta-retake of The Bell Jar. Jessica is of East Asian descent, and when she encounters images of East Asian people in Plath, Plath hates them. What happens when you love books that hate you, and how do you deal with that? It is just thrilling to see academics like Jessica using Plath like this. I hope we continue to see books, films, and novels where Plath’s story is exploded into other places.
NPH: As we end, I want to return to your title and ask what it means for you, after completing this project, to love Sylvia Plath?
EVD: I have said in other interviews that part of my inspiration was bringing the kind of love James Baldwin brings to America to Plath, refusing to martyr her and holding her to account for her anti-Black racism and antisemitism. This is a big part of my approach to Plath. But I also wanted to approach her with unconditional love, to note that she is imperfect, we all are–this is part of why we love her.
The long history of publishing on Plath was often accomplished by people who, as I said in the book, pretended to have a critical distance when, in reality, they felt real anger and disgust toward Plath. At least two prominent Plath critics were her ex-lovers, and one a boyfriend she broke up with who spent the rest of his professional life exploiting this brief romance. These people were writing with unapologetic disgust–so, why not write an unapologetic book about my absolute devotion to this dead woman, this perceived disaster?
One thing this did for me was allow me to rethink a lot of my close friends who–tragically–died by suicide when we were in our 20s (and two in their 30s/40s), to imagine them living different lives in a better, more loving and forgiving world. It made me angry that they were gone–not because they killed themselves, not angry at them–but angry because I want them here, getting older with me, rethinking the 90s, falling back in love with our lives, and having kids together. And it reminded me that Plath deserved that, too, that she died alone in London, but she had hordes of friends in America grieving her and loving her and truly believing they could have helped had they only known. But they didn’t know because part of the way intimate partner violence works is isolation–in her case, a whole ocean away.
So I grew up with the idea of a Plath who was friendless and disliked by women, who disliked women–this is ludicrous. She had lifelong friends back in Massachusetts and elsewhere who were functionally dismissed from the version of her life that we got–some only began to speak publicly about her in the last ten years–some still cry when they do. I wanted to write a love letter to Plath, to be that voice. She deserves that.
Nels P. Highberg is a Professor of English and Modern Languages at the University of Hartford.
Image of Sylvia Plath and her home’s plaque courtesy of wikicommons. Image of Ms. Magazine courtesy of Ms. Magazine.