Escape Routes

Sylvia Plath, Free Speech, & How We Survive

[Image description: a black-and-white photo of Sylvia Plath with her infant son, Nicholas, in 1962.]

On October 29, 1962, visiting London, Sylvia Plath attended a PEN party to celebrate a new anthology published by the landmark group dedicated to the defense of “freedom of expression worldwide since 1921.” The anthology, which Ted Hughes had helped to edit, had two poems by Plath, “You’re” and “Candles,” both of which dealt with pregnancy and motherhood. In “Candles,” Plath wrote, in one of her startling, unintentional ironies, “In twenty years I shall be retrograde/As these drafty ephemerids…”, unaware of her continued relevance to questions of freedom, agency, and making art in the face of silencing.

At the party, Plath spoke frankly to the other guests of her decision to leave Hughes and build her own life as a writer. This was, I think, a strategic choice, although not for obvious reasons. The literati already knew about Hughes’s affairs. It was a small, gossipy world, and Hughes was sleeping with Assia Wevill, the beautiful wife of an up-and-coming poet. Plath wasn’t there to air her dirty laundry; it had already been flapping in the breeze for months. The PEN party was a first step in carving out her own life, independent of her famous husband, one Plath was going to fight for. It was a way to tell the world that she was not going to go gently into the night of the country life Hughes had convinced her to build with him, before abandoning their marriage.

That life, she told her friends Eric and Dodo White in a letter three days before the party, was an “enforced purdah,” a theme she would pick up in her October 29 poem of the same name. In “Purdah,” Plath’s speaker refuses her place as the lead woman in the harem of a narcissist, the “Lord of the mirrors!”— while the other women chatter and attend to his every feature and need, Plath’s speaker channels Clytaemnestra, and “[unlooses]” “The lioness/The shriek in the bath/The cloak of holes.” In the poem, I hear echoes of the countless conversations and battles I imagine Plath and Hughes must have had once their marriage fell apart. You can’t just leave me out here, alone with these babies, I imagine Plath telling Hughes. But, of course, he could. He could just leave her alone in the middle of nowhere and go and fuck whoever he wanted. Then, and now. He could do what he wanted. She could not.

This time in Plath’s life, the fall of 1962, has felt especially close to me, lately. This past October, I visited Devon for the first time— the landscape of Plath’s Ariel. From the distance of the “wall of old corpses,” I snapped pictures of Court Green, Plath’s and Hughes’s country home, which is now hidden from view by towering trees. There is a sign at the top of the driveway notifying snoops like me that this is a private driveway, and to keep out. So, I wandered the graveyard and stared at the stained glass inside the church, where the saints were, indeed, “all blue,” and I watched the famous yew tree’s fingers wag in the English wind. Everywhere, it seemed, was the imprint of Sylvia Plath, who was nonetheless nowhere, stubbornly refusing to haunt me, to appear in wavering form on the streets of the village, with her dark blond hair in a smart bun and her camel coat brushing her knees.

There is absolutely fucking nothing here, I said in a video of the landscape that I took for my best friend back in the States, pondering the concept of dislocation— when an abusive partner or spouse isolates their victim, physically and/or psychologically, so that they have an easier time controlling and monitoring their actions. The village of North Tawton, where Hughes convinced Plath to move in the summer of 1961, still felt, in 2023, like it existed in 1861. There were no Ubers, and to get a taxi, you had to call a series of numbers before finally landing on a local man who sometimes drove a taxi and sometimes did not. The pubs were closed half the week and, when open, mostly did not serve food. The night my friend and I arrived, we had crisps and cider for dinner because there was no other choice. The next night, we managed to scramble to the market prior to its closing at 6 and buy enough food to buy dinner, but their offerings were slim. There were cows, and sheep, and the wild ponies on the moors, and the natural towers of toor, and endless green expanses, and they were all incredibly beautiful, and isolating, and terrifying in their isolation.

Of course, Plath did not kill herself in Devon, in October of 1962. She ended her life sixty-one years ago, on this day, February 11, 1963, in the kitchen of her London flat on Fitzroy Road. The irony is potent— despite moving herself and her babies back to London to escape the “enforced Purdah” of England’s West Country, she was arguably worse off in her beloved London, where the worst winter in a century and archaic heating and plumbing in her expensive flat found her freezing cold with two babies. She died on a waitlist for a telephone installation, and had to trudge out in the slush and snow to the red phone box on the corner to call anyone. I have also been to Fitzroy Road, many times. I confess that the house itself does little for me in the way of pilgrimages; I stare up at it and it stares back and I ponder where to go next. But the site of the red phone box, with its callback to Plath, wrapped in her overcoat and trying to reach the outside world in her last days of life— well, that is a different story, and part of the story of my own life. In the last days that I lived with a violent abuser, before I took our baby son and ran, he stole my cell phone, cutting me off from the few people I knew and might call for help. He had already convinced me, several months earlier, to leave my small hometown and large, loving, difficult family and lifelong network of friends. By the time he stole my cell phone, we were living in his small hometown— in southwest Texas, 1500 miles from everyone and everything I knew.

How I ran— how I escaped— how I began to get free, a state I am still trying to achieve— sometimes it feels so tangled with Sylvia that I wonder whose story I am telling. This is one way women writing about Plath— women writing about anything, really— have been discredited. You can’t write about Plath if you see yourself in her, or her in yourself, or you see your life in her poetry, in the desire to break out and do violence, even if the violence is against yourself, even if the violence is imaginary. You have to stand above it all and be An Objective Observer, when, at least for me, I worm my way into literature and the lives of others by common experience, however small. I see Sylvia Plath everywhere, in everything— the whole world shimmers with her life and her afterlife, shimmers with what was and is and might have been. I cannot objectively observe women in particular states of pain, because I have been that woman. Two weeks ago, I watched as a close friend tried desperately to make her life over, with her children, in the same town as her controlling ex-husband. I watched, and tried to help— I listened, and affirmed, and brought dinner, and offered playdates, and whatever else I could. I watched as he closed in on her and made her life impossible. I knew in my heart that she would have to leave and I counted down the moments in my mind until she broke the news to us that they would have to go, and remembered, in my body, the sense of a whole house, a whole town, a whole state becoming a corner so that I had to flee, or die. You can’t make your real life until you’re far away from him, I told her, and did not cry as we held one another in her kitchen and our kids played quietly in the next room, aware, as kids are, that there is a danger, nearby, one they can’t quite make out from the corner of their eye.

The next morning, she took the kids and left. I hope she gets free of him. I hope she stays away. But I am so angry that she has to, that the whole house, the whole town, the whole state, remains his provenance. I’m so angry that, as I write this, thinking of her, I weep.

*

Questions of freedom are at the heart of Plath’s poetry, her letters from the summer and fall of 1962, and the last letter she wrote to Ruth Beuscher, her therapist-turned-confidante, dated February 4, 1963, exactly a week before she gassed herself in her kitchen, having sealed her children into their nursery. Plath tells Beuscher she feels “written on the edge of madness.” The public nature of Hughes’s infidelity and the end of their marriage is humiliating, agonizing, and the initial warmth of the London literati toward her own success has waned, now, and she is alone. In language that still chokes and chills me each time I read it, Plath tells Beuscher that she is in despair at being 30 and having “mastered no body of objective knowledge.” Plath was one of the most accomplished women— okay, fuck it— people of her generation, but still, in the end, she felt she had done nothing of worth. Of course, this was partly depression talking. But Plath’s depression was, I believe, partly an outgrowth of the experience of intimate partner violence, the ways her position as Hughes’s about-to-be-ex-wife, one who would not go quietly into the night and country, isolated her from the only world she knew. In Red Comet, in an attempt to offer a balanced perspective, Heather Clark quotes Plath’s letter from October 1962 in which she writes to her friend Olive Higgins Prouty that the people at the PEN party treated her with “malicious questions [and] gloating nastiness,” but also the poet Edward Lucie-Smith, present at the party, who claims everyone was simply speaking and acting out of concern for Sylvia. By February 1963, whatever pretense literary London had made of helping Plath get work and carve out her own life seems to have evaporated, and Plath was alone, or at least, she felt entirely that way, and I think she wasn’t wrong.

Plath may not have mastered a “body of objective knowledge,” but she had mastered the knowledge of her own body, and she managed to turn it into the kind of poetry that feels, when I am most open to it, like each poem is a living thing that walks off of the page and into me. I carry her with me, and feel, when I have been away from her work for a little while, like a riderless horse. I thought of her this past May, when I attended a PEN America workshop about academic freedom, and was repeatedly shut down when I attempted to speak about my own experience of censorship at the university where I work. And again, this past week, when a colleague was in crisis, and the whole nightmare of that censorship came rolling back to me, and at me, and I woke in the middle of the night from a nightmare of violence and terror. I texted a friend, another colleague— I think this place drives people crazy. I think I am lucky to have escaped intact.

I think you’re lucky, too, she responded. I know how lucky I am. I look around the life I have, and I think of all the women who didn’t survive. I think of Randa Jarrar, “a Palestinian writer who has done weeks of unpaid labor for PEN as an event host, organizer, and judge of PEN’s Open Book prize and Robert Bingham prize. Rather than defending Jarrar’s right to free expression, PEN America violently dragged her out of [Writers Against the War on Gaza] by her audience chair, and threatened her with state violence, stating that if she did not silence herself the Los Angeles Police Department would be summoned to silence her.” I think of the women and children in Gaza, dead or living under threat of death. I think of Plath, calling her life a “Purdah,” in an act of wild appropriation that is nonetheless a kind of truth, one that points to the ways we, as her fans and scholars, must continue to interrogate how Plath’s status as a woman endangered her, and her status as a white person gave her the terrible power it gives all of us with white skin. I think this place drives people crazy, I wrote to my friend, meaning the university where I work, which I believed endangered women to protect rapists and protect itself, which I believe would, given the chance, do it again. But I also meant America, and the world, and the state of being a woman. This essay is, like its author, like getting free, like Sylvia Plath herself, a tangle and a mess, a striving toward something it can’t quite say. I hope you’ll read it, anyway.