Ted Hughes was baffled by Plath’s desire to write popular prose. Like most “serious” writers of his generation, he drew a line separating vulgar from fine art. He dismissed her efforts to write conventional fiction as “a persistent refusal of her genius.” Plath knew better. In college, she tried writing a story for True Confessions, only to shrewdly observe in her journal that doing so took “a good tight plot and a slick ease that are not picked up over night like a cheap whore.” She knew there was an art to the creation of potboilers, and she wanted to master the form. It was all part of what it meant to be Sylvia Plath. Hughes understood up to a point. After all, in his introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, a collection of her stories, he perceptively argued, “It seems probable that her real creation was her own image, so that all her writing appears like notes and jottings directing attention toward the central problem—herself.” But he could not live with the consequences of her all-consuming quest, forestalling biographical inquiry and behaving as though protecting Plath was his business.
Ted’s friends, who cared only about poetry, did not like Sylvia—indeed they saw her as an American vulgarian—but she persisted in her multitasking approach to literature. Although much emphasis has been placed on her last brief but brilliant period as a poet, in fact during this time she was also planning and writing two new novels and contemplating a career beyond poetry. “Poetry is an evasion from the real job of writing prose,” she wrote.
Susan Sontag, born just a year after Plath, is often treated as a master of melding highbrow and pop in the 1960s, but in fact Sontag abhorred mass entertainment and retreated to Parnassus as soon as she saw the consequences of mingling mainstream and minority (elitist) audiences. Indeed, in an interview, Sontag explicitly rejected Plath’s need for popular approval. Sontag could not conceive of an artist who performed on all levels of culture at once. Plath—much bolder than Sontag and a much greater artist—took on everything her society had on offer.
Witness, for example, Plath’s riveting journal entry for 4 October 1959:
Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. An occasion of “chatting” with audience much as the occasion with Eliot will turn out, I suppose. I spoke, almost in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us, although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me an expert manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.
No passage in Plath’s writings better displays her unique sensibility. And yet her biographers have ignored or misconceived this crucial evidence. In Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath, Paul Alexander calls the dream “strange.” In The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, Ronald Hayman calls the imagined audience with Monroe one of Plath’s “less disturbing” dreams. These characterizations typify the misdirected narratives that plague Plath’s legacy.
Plath imagines Marilyn Monroe as a healer and source of inspiration at a time when most women and men regarded the actress as little more than a sex symbol, the embodiment of a male fantasy. “What a doll!” the apartment superintendent keeps declaring in The Seven Year Itch. And yet, in the same film Monroe functions as a soothing and supportive figure for the clumsy Tom Ewell, telling him he is “just elegant.” And she does so in exactly the kind of maternal, fairy godmother way that makes Plath’s dream not strange but familiar. Marilyn Monroe “chats” with Sylvia Plath. The sex goddess girl-talks Sylvia. This concatenation of high and low segues into a reference to T. S. Eliot, whom Plath and Hughes were going to meet shortly. Plath was anticipating an encounter with a great poet who might also be someone she could chat up. The “audience” becomes, in Plath’s dream, a very American talk.
Who in 1959 thought of the marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller as a model to emulate? Only Sylvia Plath. Evidence discovered by Plath scholar Peter K. Steinberg shows that Plath had Monroe on her mind for quite some time. In the spring of 1959, The New Yorker rejected a poem, “A Winter’s Tale,” but the editor suggested that Plath resubmit her work after changing a line in the third stanza, “hair blonde as Marilyn’s,” referencing angels’ haloes in a Christmas scene. This fusing of the sacred and profane, so to speak, was replaced by the more sedate “Haloes lustrous as Sirius,” the brightest star in the sky, and the poem was published on 9 October, shortly after Sylvia had her Monroe dream.
Plath, like Monroe, was starstruck. Plath regarded Hughes as her hero, in the same way that Monroe looked up to Miller. The Plath-Hughes and Monroe-Miller marriages both occurred in June of 1956. Like Miller, Hughes wanted his work to be critically praised and also broadly accepted. Both men glommed onto wives who would extend their ranges by expanding their audiences. And just as Miller wrote for Monroe’s movies, Hughes dreamed of selling his children’s fables to Walt Disney. He saw his wife Sylvia as a symbol of America and a conduit to success—even though he understood next to nothing about her native land or her motivations. Their marriage broke down, in part, because Hughes, like Miller, failed to comprehend his wife’s ambition. Indeed, both men shrank from their wives’ devouring aspirations.
That Monroe could give Plath an “expert manicure” seems strange only to someone who does not understand that Monroe’s gift was to appear available and anodyne. Plath, always meticulous about personal hygiene, conceived of a domesticated Monroe, now ensconced in a happy union with a great writer—the same fate Plath imagined for herself, avoiding the “horrid cut” her culture imposed even on women of achievement. Marilyn Monroe was all promise for Sylvia Plath. In an early story, Plath asserts her own sense of superiority by portraying a young woman telling an eligible man, “So you don’t know how to treat Ava Gardner when she also has the brains of Marie Curie. So I am here to tell you I am your fairy godmother in person, complete with chocolate cake.” Ted Hughes could be of no help to Sylvia Plath, whose promise included chocolate cake and brains. His desire for a private world went against the very grain of the persona Plath was in the process of building. He let her down in ways far more disturbing than his infidelity.
In Her Husband, Diane Middlebrook has written persuasively about how Hughes perceived Plath as an incarnation of Robert Graves’s white goddess. But Plath saw herself quite differently. She resembles, it seems to me, an American Isis. She wanted to be an ideal mother and wife—but with her power, her magic, intact. Isis, especially in her earliest Egyptian incarnation (before the imposition of the Osiris myth), seems a perfect metaphor for Plath, since the mythology includes the goddess’s association with all levels of society, rich and poor. Because Plath went to the best colleges and was dressed well, Hughes mistakenly thought her wealthy when he first met her. In fact, these privileges were hard won by Plath and her mother, who worked long hours to ensure her daughter’s place in society. Hughes was a naïf compared to Plath, who worked a hard eight hours per day as a field hand the summer before she entered Smith so that she would have enough money for the clothes and books her scholarship did not afford.
Small wonder Plath has become such a revered figure. This was a domestic goddess who loved to cook and clean. She appreciated the joys of everyday life. Ted Hughes did not know how to balance a checkbook; Sylvia Plath did. He never washed his clothes; Sylvia Plath did. He did not know how to compete in a quickly changing literary world; Sylvia Plath did. He drew back from her satire of friends and family in The Bell Jar, completely misconceiving her work, which deliberately transgressed the separation of art and autobiography. The marriage may have lasted as long as it did because he liked to cook and thought highly of her poetry. But Sylvia shot down his notion that they shared “one mind,” as he told interviewer Peter Orr. She told Orr she was “more practical.”