Sylvia has become the most recognizable standin for the tedious, ill-advised twentieth-century confessional author. Despite her coming of age among a cohort of men describing their own venereal disease as if the pustules themselves were matters worthy of the canon, it is Sylvia’s interior life that is so often pointed to as a case of something crass and self-indulgent. To this day, even as Sylvia is long dead by her own hand, her cautionary tale is not about lives poorly lived but about feelings too earnestly expressed. Nearly half a century after her death, we remain more interested in girls’ being kept palatable than being kept alive.
The number of hands that have been wrung and fingers that have been wagged at girls who dare to give voice and name to their interior lives suggests that the written history of the world is absolutely awash in the stuff. But the female voice, and the girl’s voice especially, is characterized mostly by the deafening silence it emits from the canon. To read the historical record without context suggests that female self-awareness was a genetic anomaly that emerged in the eighteenth century and remained exceedingly rare until the second half of the twentieth century. Those who dare to document their lived experience as worthwhile are brave new girls indeed. As brightly as these girls shine, there remain wet blankets around every corner attempting to extinguish the flames in their hearts. They are dismissed as excessively feminine and juvenile, two words that mean the same thing in the hearts and minds of critics who would sooner praise a six-volume gaze at a Norwegian man’s navel than consider the possibility that there are treasures in the hearts of girls. There is no girl that such critics have tried to extinguish more diligently than young Sylvia herself. In the years following her death, she has been accused of culpability in suicides that took place fifty years after her own, along with single-handedly ushering in the idea of suicide as glamorous by people who have apparently never heard of Ernest Hemingway or Jesus Christ. The fact of the matter remains that young women are easy to destroy and doubly easy to destroy if they are already dead. Fortunately, it is also historically the habit of young girls to practice witchcraft, and so the girls keep bringing Sylvia back to life.
Young girls are smarter than they’re given credit for, and more resilient, too. They like what they like for good reason. They seek to build kingdoms out of their favorite people and things, and there is a certain subset of girls, even today, who have made Sylvia their icon-elect. The reputation of young girls for “wearing their hearts on their sleeves” is one that is discussed more often as unwittingly sharing too much information, rather than framing them as active agents making decisions on how best to publicly express themselves. Public derision is directed at girls wearing T-shirts of boy bands or one half of a best-friend-necklace pairing because we assume that such unsubtle devotion is the result of juvenile obliviousness, rather than bold and certain admiration. There is intention behind both the words and the images these girls share in their modes of self-expression, intention that we overlook at the peril of our own understanding of how affections operate throughout a lifetime.
At the convergence of adolescent admiration for Sylvia and the penchant to wear one’s interests in literal and visible ways is a massive selection of Sylvia paraphernalia available for purchase online. I discovered this treasure trove by accident when looking for a canvas bag with a quote from Joan Didion on the online crafting marketplace Etsy. I found the bag in an online shop that featured loads of items inspired by Sylvia Plath’s words and face. I conducted a search for her name that rendered 399 results. In contrast, “Joan Didion” presented a single page of 11 crafts dedicated to the author. A search for Flannery O’Connor and all of her haunted glory netted 35 results. The closest iconic twentieth-century author I could search, Toni Morrison, trailed with 58 items.
The clothes featuring Sylvia’s image and words vary wildly in cost and quality, but they are a collection so diverse in color, design, and selected imagery and text that one could wear nothing but Sylvia-related garments for weeks before anyone detected the pattern. In my initial search in the late fall of 2015, I discovered a pair of flats featuring her portrait, some poetry, and an image of her tombstone.1 And then there are the necklaces. Oh praise God, the necklaces! There are brass lockets on long chains and short typed quotes in literary serif fonts protected by a layer of glass, and there are small portraits of Sylvia in the style of a cameo. I imagine these pieces strewn across young necks throughout the world, standalone best-friend necklaces for the kind of girl who prefers the company of ghosts.
Beyond clothing and accessories, one could build a whole aesthetic around Sylvia trinkets, and I’m sure there are girls who have. Their bodies and pencil cases are transformed to shrines for the poet whose words helped them exhale at last what it meant to feel in the world as a girl. There is even a criminally unrepresentative doll meant to be Sylvia.2 It would be nice to believe that the women who make and purchase these devotional items are simply unaware of the disdain Sylvia has incurred from the literary establishment, but as a mere matter of probability, I have my doubts that they are.
“Sylvia Plath’s remarkable position today is only partly due to the brilliance of her writing” is as dull a way to start a book as it is an obvious one, but it is how Marianne Egeland begins Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure. Of course a beautiful, brilliant, mentally tortured, and dead young woman is going to be made something more special in the public imagination than a plain and neurotypical one who succumbs to heart failure in old age. Though Egeland admits in her final chapter that this mythology is more about how Sylvia has been used than how she herself lived or created, the narration at times makes Sylvia’s actions appear as if they were intended to be the spark to light some greater movement. “Killing herself in the same year that The Feminine Mystique (1963) was published by Betty Friedan, and leaving behind two small children and a manuscript of outstanding poems, Plath seemed to confirm romantic notions about the poet and to demonstrate the difficulties women artists had of surviving in a man’s world,” she writes.3 In other words, it was stunt marketing by asphyxiation.