"Selective" Remembrances of Sylvia Plath

The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982, The Dial Press, McCullough and Hughes, eds.

By Joan Benson

and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on 'the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never find again, and my favorite silver earrings: hah I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem "I did it, 1.” Such violence, and I see how women lie down for artists....

The Journals of Sylvia Plath were published last spring by The Dial Press, under the editorship of Frances McCullough and Ted Hughes, Plath's husband and literary executor. According to Nancy Milford, in her review in the New York Times, the passage above is the galley version of Sylvia's first encounter with Ted Hughes. What came out in the wash-or rather, what ended up in print; is this:

..and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth [omission]. . . And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face [omission).

The whole text of the. Journals is littered with these editorial omissions, especially in passages of rage.or sexual arousal. They are a disturbing manipulation of Plath's experience, and yet in spite of them, Plath unfolds to us as a very passionate woman. She was filled with drive to fulfill and transcend conventional ambitions for marriage and artistic success. She wants a strong man, a strong and supportive marriage; she wants children; she wants to write and write and publish and be famous. Throughout the early years, Plath's ambitions conflict with an abject fear of failure. She often uses the journals as a kind of examining table for all her faults. Even her growth toward a mature acceptance of her fallibility is driven;

No more knuckling under, groaning, moaning: one gets used to pain. This hurts. Not being

Lost in the Rewriting

(HerSay)-If you think author Virginia Woolf's works pack a wallop now, here's some news worth noting: Woolf usually watered down her original drafts' more radical sections. So says Louise ReSalvo, a New York Professor of Literature and Women's Studies who has just finished a decade of research on Woolf's first, novel, The Voyage Out. DeSalvo says earlier drafts of the book are “more left-wing, more egalitarian, more lesbian and more feminist" than the text that was eventually published.

DeSalvo theorizes that Woolf toned down the original drafts so that they would have a better chance of being reviewed and later published. Says DeSalvo, "Historically, overt lesbian movements in fiction could not occur; they would be taken off the shelves."

DeSalvo has recreated the first draft of The Voyage Out, which has just been published under Woolf's original title, Melymbrosia.

perfect hurts. . . I have often fought, fought and won, not perfection but an acceptance of myself.

As we expect in a journal, the quality of the prose varies. Some of it is bits and pieces of scenes and conversations, but most of it is a monologue to herself about daily events, hungers, and fears. The words often press together in a torrent; it is this flushed language that captivates and keeps the reader moving through the slower passages.

The published journals begin the year Plath first entered Smith College, 1950, and continue, in spite of several noteworthy gaps, to 1959, just before she moved to England and bore her first child, and four years before her death. The months preceding Plath's suicide attempt in August, 1953, and the two years following are missing. The editors say that if there were ever journals for this time, they must have disappeared. This is the time of her life of which Plath wrote in The Bell Jar, so some record of it remains. Also missing, with no explanation, are the months from April of 1956 to July of that year, months of courtship and marriage to Ted Hughes. The published journals end in 1959 because no jour✦nals for the last, most productive years of her life survive. In his forward to the volume, Hughes explains.

Two more notebooks survived for a while, maroon-backed ledgers like the '57-'59 volume,

and continued the record from late '59 to within three days of her death. The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival). The other disappeared.

The months destroyed were the months after their marriage ended, the months of Plath's greatest productivity, the prolific months in which she wrote the poems of Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees. Editorial statements about this period are contradictory at best. In the forward, Hughes expresses his opinion that Plath had finally found her true self, her real voice, and yet he destroyed it. The closing editorial comment, 357 pages later, begins: "Because only work notes survive from this last section of journal, it almost gives the impression that Plath died long before she actually did end her life." This statement displays gross ignorance, another selected moment of amnesia. It glosses over and then blithely ignores the fact that it was not Plath who killed the true voice of those last, lost days, but Hughes.

Editorial explanation for this criterion of selective remembrance seems honorable on first examination. The editors' sole concern is the peace of those who (continued on page 15)

Mini-Reviews from The Feminist Library

Folly, by Maureen Brady. Crossing Press, 1982.

Set in a southern mill town, Folly is the story of Black and white working class women struggling to unionize for the first time. The author, Maureen Brady, gives a compassionate view of the personal discoveries and struggles of the women, placing them into an historically-based account of a sewing factory strike (originally chronicled by Kathy Kahn in Hillbilly Women, Doubleday, 1972). The author's skill in confronting issues of racism, heterosexism, women's isolation and women's independence, without losing "real" personal drama, is a wonder. Her portrayal of one mother-daughter relationship as it struggles with the mother's developing love affair is particularly touching. Like Brady's first novel, Give Me Your Good Ear (Spinsters Ink, 1979), Folly is a book well worth reading.

Images of Ourselves: Women with Disabilities Talking, Jo Campling, ed. Routledge & Kegan.

This book is a selection of accounts written by British women with severe disabilities. I liked the fact that the editor allows women to write their own accounts rather than interviewing them. Although this book includes women of varying ages and disabilities, there is not much of a feminist perspective and nothing written by disabled lesbians. Images of Ourselves deals with the challenges and oppressions ⚫ toward disabled women in our society.

One last note: Because this book was written in Britain, the sign language alphabet in the beginning is British sign language and not American.

The Nesting Place, by Sarah Aldridge. Naiad Press, $6.95.

If you liked anything else by Aldridge, you'll like

this one. The familiar ingredients of "a delicious romance or two, suspenseful subplots and slippery sex scenes" are all here. The writing is good and the characters believable, which makes up for a rather worn-out plot. If you enjoy reading about romance among wealthy women with no mention of politics, you'll like this book.

Kinds of Love, by May Sarton. Norton, $4.95.

This isn't a new book, but May Sarton has suddenly become popular. Kinds of Love is about a small town and the passions of the people there, the "winter people"-those who stay throughout the year. The first fifty pages are slow, but once you get involved with the people, it is hard to put the book down.

The preceding books are all available from the Cleveland Feminist Lending Library. A shipment of non-sexist children's books will be arriving soon from Lollipop Power. We've also managed to get in most of the special requests. Book donations have slowed down to a trickle; please, we still need books! Thanks to the people who have donated money; it allows the Library to buy the latest books, which tend to be the most popular. The Library has a great :selection of research books that need to be utilized.

Please treat the books with care. They'll last a lot longer. A few books are missing from the Library. If you've taken a book and forgotten to sign it out, please return it right away.

The hours of the Feminist Library are Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Wednesday, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Thursday, 3:00-5:00 and 6:30-8:00 p.m., and Saturday 5:00-7:00 p.m. (and before and during breaks on Women's Coffee House nights).

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March, 1983/What She Wants/Page 7