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Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

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"Chapters In A Mythology" reveals that Sylvia Plath was more interested in the psyche than her biographers suggest. Sylvia's interest in psychology led her to read the work of Carl Jung and her husband Ted Hughes introduced her to the book "The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar Of Poetic Myth" by Robert Graves which is a study of the mythological and psychological sources of poetry in paganism.

Ted Hughes suggests that Sylvia possessed the visionary faculty of a shaman, "In her poetry...she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans, and Holy men.." Judith Kroll explains Sylvia's fascination for the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico in the following terms, "For Sylvia Plath, the typical 'metaphysical' landscape provided a visual setting for the fixed, super-real, ominous, inaccessible drama of the psyche." She further praises Sylvia's "openness to contact with the unconscious are developed to an extraordinary degree." Kroll sees Sylvia's references to witches and Greek mythology as examples of paganism. For example, she argues that Sylvia viewed her nervous breakdown as a shaman's dismemberment and rebirth through ritual death of the psyche and recovery, "The dispersed 'stones' of the speaker's shattered self are gathered together and reconstructed, reenacting the myths of Dionysus (who is alluded to in 'Maenad'), Osiris, and other gods who undergo dismemberment and resurrection."

Kroll reveals that Sylvia Plath had read William James' book "Varieties of Religious Experience", "The Ten Principal Upanishads" by William Butler Yeats, "The Tibetan Book Of The Dead", and possibly some books on Zen Buddhism. Sylvia was interested in states of consciousness in which the mundane self is felt to die and a higher and larger self recovered. Therefore she was not morbidly interested in physical death but rather in ego death which permits a rebirth as a mystic in life. Although there is considerable evidence that Sylvia experienced brief moments of ecstasy such as may occur during the manic phase of a manic depressive illness, it seems unlikely that she reached the spiritual attainment of enlightenment or mystical union with the universe or God because such mystical experiences would have given her a reason to live.

this book was extremely helpful to me while in school. The book didn't strike me in the same way it did the last person, but, then, I didn't read it cover to cover. One thing I do remember about Kroll's book was that she expressed the belief that it was a mistake or an injustice to simply read Plath's poetry as a suicide note or as something tangible left in evidence at a crime scene, like a blood stain or a chalk outline. I agree--while Plath was a confessional poet, she was different from Sexton and Lowell and the like in that she created a mythological world in which she cast her speaker as the lead. There are symbolic cycles, colors, characters, elements of re-birth, etc that would not be present if that were the case. So while some people read Plath's poetry as tangible proof of mental illness or the need for feminism or whatever, Kroll reinforced the idea that there was another level to her poetry--a mythological one. That was what I gathered from my use of the book. I felt that Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame had the Olwyn Hughes-informed subjectivity though. But then, that was biography, not a study on her poetry...

One of the theories of Plath's work presented in Knoll's book "Chapters in a Mythology" is that Plath's poems reflect the struggle between Plath's warring "true" and "false" selves. In the same way, Knoll seems to be trying to serve to masters when writing her book. She writes of working closely and very well with the Hughes estate, something which is almost unheard of, considering most critics and biographer's of Plath only come head-to-head against the estate's manipulation and tight grasp on the rights to Plath's works. One arguement is that too much of her work is being transformed into a feminist liberation cause that Plath herself never took up.

For Knoll, the temptation to put in some feminist criticism was too great, as it sneaks in here and there, as she deconstructs such poems as "Rabbit Catcher" and "Moon and the Yew Tree" in the way in which the Hughes estate sees fit, sneaking in feminist thinking between the lines. What comes through ends up being a muddied critique with conflicting ideas trying to support themselves with the same evidence at hand. Knoll, like Plath, was trying to server to masters in the authorship of this book. However, unlike her subject, Knoll was unable to sucessfully convey the meaning sufficantly for either side.