Reclaiming Sylvia Plath

Unmaking the Myth of Lady Lazarus

This summer, I’ll be teaching a three-week online course, Reclaiming Sylvia Plath: Unmaking the Myth of Lady Lazarus for the 92nd St. Y’s Roundtable series. It begins Wednesday, 7/17 at 3:00 EST, and runs through the following two weeks on the same day and time. I would love to see you there!

Here is the course overview:

When Sylvia Plath's Ariel was posthumously published in 1965, it changed the face of modern British and American poetry. Plath's stark, violent verse quickly became emblematic of of the 1960s, and her 1963 suicide branded as the "cause" of the poetry by influential literary critics like Al Alvarez and George Steiner. In spite of this, by the mid-1970s, as Plath's fame reached its zenith, the young women who championed her work as that of a burgeoning feminist writing critically of marriage and motherhood were cast as "cultists" who martyred Sylvia Plath, worshipping at the altar of her suicide-- an image that remains with us, today. In reality, in the 1970s, young women scholars and activists like Harriet Rosenstein, Judith Kroll, and Robin Morgan, fueled by their conviction that Plath's life and work were being censored by her widower, the British poet Ted Hughes, were conducting groundbreaking research on Sylvia Plath, most of which would disappear from public knowledge for decades. 

Emily Van Duyne, a Fulbright scholar and associate professor who has spent her life studying Sylvia Plath's life, work, and literary afterlife, will walk us through the construction of Plath's mythology, the ways it clashes with her biography, and the nuances of Plath's writing on intimate partner violence. We will look at recently discovered archival documents, like Plath's letters to her psychiatrist in the last six months of her life, and, using contemporary feminist theory, try and understand why, when Plath speaks frankly about her husband's brutality, we refuse to listen.