{"id":28787,"date":"2022-02-23T01:40:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-23T01:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=28787"},"modified":"2022-03-01T00:29:50","modified_gmt":"2022-03-01T00:29:50","slug":"how-sylvia-plaths-secret-miscarriage-transforms-our-understanding-of-her-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-sylvia-plaths-secret-miscarriage-transforms-our-understanding-of-her-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"How Sylvia Plath\u2019s secret miscarriage transforms our understanding of her poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jason Miller<\/a>, North Carolina State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2017, one of Sylvia Plath\u2019s private letters, which had previously not been made public, included a startling revelation: Plath suggested that her husband, poet Ted Hughes, was responsible for the miscarriage of their child in February 1961.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heather Clark\u2019s recent biography of Plath, \u201cRed Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath<\/a>,\u201d includes this new information. But no scholarship has yet to contextualize the painful event as a means to reinterpret two of Plath\u2019s most autobiographical poems, \u201cThe Rabbit Catcher\u201d and \u201cThalidomide.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a scholar of 20th-century American poetry<\/a>, I teach Plath regularly in my university classrooms and direct graduate theses about her works. To me, this new biographical information, together with Plath\u2019s drafts and journal entries, reveals how she channeled this painful experience into her poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Details of a miscarriage emerge<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

From Feb. 18, 1960, to Feb. 4, 1963, Sylvia Plath wrote a series of 14 intensely personal letters to psychologist Ruth Beuscher. In the letters \u2013 which span the most volatile era of Plath\u2019s marriage, writing and eventual suicide \u2013 Plath opens up about topics she didn\u2019t discuss with anyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scholars learned about these letters only in 2017 when they suddenly came up for auction, and a subsequent lawsuit<\/a> eventually awarded them to Smith College, Plath\u2019s alma mater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Plath\u2019s marriage dissolved \u2013 she and Hughes separated in September 1962 \u2013 she had no reason to protect Hughes any longer. On September 22, 1962, she wrote to Beuscher: \u201cTed beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Man
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had a turbulent relationship. Evening Standard\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As Clark explains in \u201cRed Comet,\u201d one day in early February 1961, Plath, who was four months pregnant, answered the phone at her home in Devon, England. It was the influential BBC personality Moira Doolan on the other line, and Doolan seemed startled to hear anyone but Ted answering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Plath, this response was evidence of an affair. She began tearing her husband\u2019s writings into long strips. She broke a mahogany table that was an heirloom of Ted\u2019s. Plath was furious that he could have been having an affair while simultaneously being, as she wrote, so \u201cimpervious\u201d to the \u201cinnumerable little umbilical cords\u201d that tied her to her unborn child and 10-month-old girl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Hughes found Plath in this rage, he began striking her repeatedly. Her unborn child, about four months along, died within days. Clark asserts the miscarriage likely took place on Monday, Feb. 6, 1961.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two soon conceived again and their child, Nick, was born on Jan. 17, 1962<\/a>. Plath died by suicide<\/a> on Feb. 11, 1963, after having written the most important poems of her life during the six months before her death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of these poems were eventually included in the collection \u201cAriel<\/a>,\u201d which was published posthumously in 1965. But only in 2004 did two of them \u2013 \u201cThalidomide\u201d and \u201cThe Rabbit Catcher\u201d \u2013 appear in an updated version. The former, known for its surrealistic imagery, was open to multiple interpretations. The latter was received as a poem that directly addressed Ted\u2019s infidelity<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Plath addressed the topic of miscarriage in her radio play \u201cThree Women<\/a>\u201d and the poems \u201cElm<\/a>\u201d and \u201cParliament Hill Fields<\/a>,\u201d the poems in \u201cAriel\u201d seem to substantively build off her own personal experience with losing an unborn child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A poem imbued with new meaning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The once elusive \u201cThalidomide,\u201d which was written after Nick was born, can now be read within the context of the emotional roller coaster of her miscarriage up through the birth of a healthy son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plath begins \u201cThalidomide\u201d with the image of \u201cO half moon.\u201d In Plath\u2019s handwritten drafts, which are available at Smith College<\/a>, you can see that this image is the poem\u2019s original title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This moon is an omen for miscarriage. Letters Plath exchanged with poet Ruth Fainlight<\/a> reveal that Plath regarded this symbol directly animated by Fainlight\u2019s poem \u201cSapphic Moon,\u201d which is also about a miscarriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThalidomide\u201d then graphically evokes the imagery of a lynching. Something has been dismembered to resemble a dark victim burned until its limbs are short and its face is \u201cmasked like a white.\u201d The most profound analog is the Billie Holiday song \u201cStrange Fruit<\/a>,\u201d and Plath alludes to the song when she writes, \u201cThe dark fruits revolve and fall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about the poem\u2019s title? There is no evidence Plath ever took thalidomide<\/a>, a drug developed in 1954 prescribed to treat several symptoms including nausea and anxiety in pregnant women. However, she likely would have read about the horrors of its side effects if taken during pregnancy, which surfaced in 1962 when researchers and doctors discovered that over 10,000 children<\/a> were born with missing or badly misshapen limbs to women prescribed the drug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the poem, Plath connects her experience with the fears of a pregnant woman taking thalidomide. She describes \u201cindelible buds\u201d and \u201cknuckles at the shoulder-blades\u201d arriving with only a \u201cHalf-brain.\u201d Plath herself was four months through the nine-month term when she had her miscarriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plath\u2019s drafts<\/a> also offer a window into her inspiration and creative process. Before removing such direct references to her miscarriage, she originally describes it as \u201cthat abortion\u201d and \u201cbig abortion.\u201d It is a \u201csin that cries,\u201d complete with imagery that describes a fetus \u201cthin as an eyelid\u201d with \u201cthe smell of perilous slumber.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just 11 months after her miscarriage, Nick would be born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of her most haunting journal entries, she describes<\/a> his birth: \u201cI shut my eyes, so I would see and feel from the inside \u2013 a horror of seeing the baby before Ted told me it was normal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of \u201cThalidomide,\u201d Plath writes, \u201cThe glass cracks across, \/ The image \/ Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.\u201d The imagery evokes a lightbulb that shatters, releasing mercury gas trapped within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And just like that, the birth of a child replaces the toxic memory of a miscarriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rabbit died<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Two weeks before Plath started writing \u201cThalidomide,\u201d on Oct. 14, 1962, the British newspaper The Observer published an article<\/a> about how the drug was being tested on pregnant rabbits to show how it caused deformities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Rabbit Catcher\u201d \u2013 which was originally titled \u201cSnares\u201d \u2013 immediately precedes \u201cThalidomide\u201d in Plath\u2019s version of \u201cAriel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the knowing reader, the old-fashioned saying that hovers silently behind this poem is the phrase \u201cthe rabbit died<\/a>,\u201d which comes from the fact that pregnancy tests from the 1920s involved injecting a woman\u2019s urine into rabbits<\/a>. Many people mistakenly believed that an injection that killed the rabbit signaled a positive test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among \u201cbirth pangs,\u201d a \u201chollow\u201d and \u201ca vacancy,\u201d \u201cThe Rabbit Catcher\u201d includes objects that resemble umbilical cords. Plath writes of \u201csnares,\u201d \u201cZeroes, shutting on nothing,\u201d and \u201cwires.\u201d The line \u201cI felt a still busyness of intent\u201d was once read as anxiety over Ted\u2019s sexual advances to others; it now reads as if Plath were reliving the process of delivering a lost child too soon. And the final line of the poem \u2013 \u201cThe constriction killing me also\u201d \u2013 points to Plath\u2019s feeling as if she, too, is dying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The phrases from Plath\u2019s earlier drafts<\/a> are illuminating: \u201cI was a flat personage,\u201d it was \u201ca clean killing,\u201d and it was all \u201cFinal, like a bad accident.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Over 140,000 readers rely on The Conversation\u2019s newsletters to understand the world.<\/em> Sign up today<\/a>.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most potent of all, Plath writes in an earlier draft of what can be understood only as her portrayal of Ted\u2019s reaction: \u201cIt might cause him a morning\u2019s anger.\u201d This line represents Ted as so emotionally shallow that the loss barely registers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it any surprise that it was Ted Hughes who removed these two poems<\/a> before \u201cAriel\u201d was first published?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time, only he knew of the deep family trauma they probed. And only in the fully restored 2004 edition<\/a> of \u201cAriel\u201d did they appear as Plath intended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jason Miller<\/a>, Professor of English, North Carolina State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Miller, North Carolina State University In 2017, one of Sylvia Plath\u2019s private letters, which had previously not been made public, included a startling revelation: Plath suggested that her husband, poet Ted Hughes, was responsible for the miscarriage of their child in February 1961. Heather Clark\u2019s recent biography of Plath, \u201cRed Comet: The Short Life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":28788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293,8025],"tags":[2481,3505,5373,5710,2033,493,4263,1929,11381,11382,3504],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28787"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28787"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28831,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28787\/revisions\/28831"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}