Rereading Sylvia
One theory of poltergeists — a theory that Plath surely would’ve liked — has it that some teenage girls are overflowing with so much repressed fury and unexpressed sexual energy that they cause supernatural phenomena — chairs flying across the room, strange spontaneous bleeding. Plath, like the fili, was a hardcore, full-body poet. She was kabbalistic, a golem-maker, and she created any number of monsters that still haunt readers. Her work exposes all of the worst humiliations of growing up female. It’s only natural, when she opened that basement door a crack, that her extensive biographies should reveal page after page of new embarrassments — her confessions of sexual frustration, her sugar-coated letters to her mother, her lost, private battles, her trying too hard and caring too much, her insatiable pride, her obvious desperation.
(via bookslut)