I fell in love with Sylvia in that scroll of disjointed quotes and fell with an enthusiasm I had not felt since college when I discovered the especially unforgiving love songs of the Magnetic Fields and the renewed rage of a mid-career Fiona Apple. Sylvia’s words were reflections on love and doubt and suffering and the brutal nexus where they all come together in a tender corner of the human heart (“You are a dream; I hope I never meet you”). But they were also nonsense and melodrama without their contexts (“I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets”). I went through page after page until the quotes came to an end, and throughout my read, I tried to put together The Bell Jar in something like order only to realize it is a chronicle of disorder. When their origins weren’t labeled, I wondered which quotes came from her poetry and which from her diaries, trying to detect either her bright-eyed teen years or the shadow-stricken days that drew her toward the light at the back of the oven. I wondered if ovens had lights in the back in 1963.
Her words made me want to see her face, but there was only one image that dominated the Google image search: Plath in a half-grinning portrait in which she seems confidently unimpressed. Her hair hangs just below her shoulders and is pinned on the left side of her head. She’s wearing a cardigan of some sort. She looks like she’s in possession of either a brand-new secret or a very old one, and it’s how I’ve seen many women writers look at readings when they’ve been asked asinine questions by men. But knowing this image well, I searched for more images. I turned to Tumblr, where enterprising young people have reliably excavated archives of lesser-known pictures to bring texture and time to the lives of those who are long dead. These young curators did not disappoint.
I found her unflattering school portrait, better left to the dustbin for such a beauty. I found her wearing a white pillbox hat as she gazes at her interview subject, Elizabeth Bowen, during an assignment for Mademoiselle. There was an image of her lying on the beach with her eyes closed, bronzed and grinning in a strapless white swimsuit. It seemed Plath was always wearing swimsuits, even in the absence of any evidence of nearby water. In another photo, she wears a modest two-piece swimsuit and holds a dandelion as if it were a pet, the note reading that this was taken in 1954, during her “platinum summer.” In another, she wears a black halter top and takes a drink, of what I can only assume is an adult beverage. She appears as mostly an outline blur on the cover of The Colossus and Other Poems, bedecked in a scarf or cape of some kind, and she is a smile incarnate on the cover of her unabridged journals. For all the unruliness of her heart, she was certainly a compliant subject for photographers.
I write of these photographs as if I found them in rapid, orderly succession on Tumblr, but anyone familiar with the platform knows that its treasures do not come that way. Instead, these images are tucked into the folds of the infinite scroll that a reader finds when entering “Sylvia Plath” in the search bar. It is overwhelmingly the same quotes from Goodreads given new life in bigger, more artful fonts. I hoped to find rhyme and reason in them, an evident winner like the one on Goodreads: one quote to rule them all. But on Tumblr, each girl who posts about Sylvia Plath has her own kingdom to run. She cannot necessarily be bothered with choosiness. But when she can be bothered to choose, she will be meticulous to the point of obsession about making the correct choice.
Many of the girls I find on Tumblr reblog Plath quotes mechanically alongside a mountain of melancholy content. They are found with photos of wilted flowers and tattoos in Courier New and the occasional textual allusion to glorifying anorexia. These girls create heaping monuments to pain and subsequently gain impressive followings that suggest the world is every bit as heartbroken as we’ve suspected all along. Others are more careful curators, and they share less often but more thoughtfully. Sylvia quotes appear alongside photos of Virginia Woolf with her own words scrawled over them and GIFs of Fiona Apple writhing uncomfortably in her own sexualized body. The suffering is palpable in these media. Regardless of the format, it bears the fingerprints of femininity thrown off balance. With all that smiling she did in photos, she struck me as the kind of woman who didn’t want to cause a lot of trouble except when she was ready to cause nothing short of a disaster.
There are occasional photos of Sylvia’s books themselves and even more of books opened to particularly moving passages by her, a post habit to which I myself must also confess when I cannot resist transmitting a cutting word from Simone Weil or Flannery O’Connor or passages from that lonely grouch of a poet, R. S. Thomas, into the digital world. The open books feature in orderly stacks on white backdrops and on dirty sheets. There are also a number of tattoos of quotes from Sylvia’s books, her words etched forever onto female skin and preserved, at least for now, on the Internet for the masses to admire, judge, and envy accordingly. There is even an entire Tumblr account devoted to her words on skin, Sylvia Plath Ink.5 Many of the tattoos featured there are still surrounded by inflamed skin, indicating that these were photographed as brand-new markings and that their owners urgently wished to share with the world how their bodies and her words had become one.
“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end,” a collarbone reads. A rib cage cries out, “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me,” alongside a flower. I find a thigh bearing the words:
The claw
Of the magnolia
Drunk on its own secrets
Asks nothing of life.