Sylvia Plath

I've recently gained a morbid interest in Sylvia Plath the late depressed poet. I hold her ability to write at will, although in depression, in awe, and I feel being able to express your anguish in abstract terms which only you can comprehend is a form of great release. Release which we often find elusive in our demanding lives.

Below is an excerpt from "Slyvia Plath:Creativity and Psychotic Defenses" in The Wisdom of Ego by George E. Vaillant, pages 233-234:

"At age 23, Plath married Ted Hughes, a distinguished poet in his own right who would later become England’s Poet Laureate. After teaching brilliantly for a year at Smith, she moved to England, bore two children, and wrote The Bell Jar between the ages of 25 and 29. In 1962, the year before her death, Plath published The Bell Jar under an assumed name — as if she needed to isolate herself from ownership of her anger even in the sublimated form of her novel. That fall she also separated from her unfaithful husband, moved from Devon to London, and again became increasingly psychotically disturbed. As she had at age 20, Plath again began neglecting her personal self. But instead of her earlier writer’s block she engaged in a frenzy of creativity that, like Van Gogh’s creativity during the last two years of his life, illustrated the lack of a clear boundary between art and psychosis. In the five months before she killed herself by putting her head in her gas oven, Plath produced her most luminous art, the Ariel poems. "I am living like a Spartan," she wrote to her friend Ruth Fainlight, "writing through huge fevers and producing free stuff that I had locked in me for years."

Kate Moses has brought the essence of the late Sylvia Plath to life by attempting 'Wintering', her debut novel. A review descirbed the effort as 'extraordinary' and 'realistic in its execution'. From Amazon.com:

'In her debut novel, Wintering, Kate Moses recreates the heart, soul, and psyche of Sylvia Plath, a feat that is so extraordinary and so realistic in its execution that it is difficult to know where to start in describing it. In preparation for this novel, Moses did as much research as many doctoral candidates do, reading virtually every piece of Plath's writing, both public and private, and most, if not all, of the resource material about Plath -- her journals and letters, comments by contemporaries, letters to and from her mother, her daily calendars, audio recordings, biographies, manuscripts, notes by Ted Hughes, and even her baby book. So completely did she distill this material that the reader of the novel feels as if she or he is actually entering the mind of Plath, a Plath who is speaking and reminiscing, conjuring up events, aching, dreaming, and hoping. Astonishingly, Moses achieves this without ever deviating from a third person narrative and without ever speaking as Plath herself.'

The review provides alluring qualites of the book no doubt, but one does wonder if the true essence of Plath has been exploited and misinterpreted in the book's execution.
A contradicting article on the Straits Times Life!(Saturady July 3 2004 'They see dead writers')provides exactly this view:

'Kate Moses's Wintering is just annoying as she tries to enter Plath's mind during the last months of her life.

Each chapter has the title of a poem from the volume Ariel, slavishly following the order that Plath left in her manuscript rather than the restructured version Hughes brought out after her death.

The novel is one more post-mortem attempt to claim Sylvia as a matyred heroine, although she seems perfectly capable of her own literary revenge from the grave.'

A paragraph that I think sums it all up(from the same ST Life! article):

'Novels and poems exist precisely because their authors didn't want to explain themselves in straightforward terms, yet most re-inventions try to solve the dead writer's personality like a puzzle.'

So when do we draw the line between blatant dissection of the author's work, and maintaining the author's true intentions? These boundaries are vague, and more often than not people have disagreements towards which literary works are on the right track, and which deviate from just that. I cannot fully proclaim my humble views, just so because I haven't even read Plath's Ariel, and much less Moses's Wintering. However it becomes interesting for me to note that Plath has the enigmatic power to induce debates like these over her works, lying in her grave though she might be. And turning in it too, should she feel her efforts have been 'exploited' so.

Right. I'm off to the library now. ;)