Books: "I Am the Arrow: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems"

 

I Am the Arrow: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems

By Sarah Ruden

Library of America; hardcover; $22; available today, Tuesday, March 25th

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Sarah Ruden is one of the leading interpreters of ancient literature, as she has translated many works, including Virgil's Aeneid, Aristophanes's Lysistrada, Augustine's Confessions, and written a biography of Vergil. She also has published books about the Bible, Paul among the People and The Face of Water. Ruden has a pair of forthcoming books, a biography of the martyr Perpetua, and A Short History of Bad Ideas, her survey of writing against reproductive choice since the Roman Empire.

Ruden has long had a passion for Sylvia Plath's poetry, and in the new I Am the Arrow, she offers a profound reconsideration of Plath's genius. She contends that Plath is more than a mythmaker, but a classical hero who's striving, suffering, and descending to an underworld that threatens meaninglessness and despair, then returning to speak the previously unspoken. 

A writer and a woman becomes that hero for the first time. For Ruden, this achievement, which was driven by the deep learning and driving ambition that fueled it, has been overshadowed by the sensational and tragic details of Plath's life. This included her ill-starred marriage to British poet Ted Hughes and her suicide at the age of thirty on February 11, 1963, in a London flat she lived in with her children.

Ruden offers a much-needed corrective through her close readings of six poems, "Mushrooms," "You're," "The Babysitters," "The Applicant," "Ariel," and "Edge," which reveal how Plath persisted in the face of illness to produce works of disquieting beauty and uncanny power. 

Plath is often viewed as "more of a political cause than a poet," writes Rubin, as it is "a judgment that reduces her reach into new readerships and frustrates lucid judgment of her aesthetics. But the problem with bewailing this impression of her is how freighted Plath actually was - and how she freighted her work in turn - with conflicts heavier than those of personal tragedy, conflicts that were social and historical, and thus public issues, active all around her and pressing in on her; that did invite her to resist everything around her; that do lure us to take her side, almost as if she were still alive and could, like a living person, find victory."

This collection is an invitation to give these poems a new reading, as Ruden "will be arguing for Plath's establishment, on purely literary merit, in the cool mainstream of literary greatness, which verges toward political tolerance and open-mindedness." While it is a perfect chance for new readers of Plath's poetry devoted fans will appreciate the new insights.

Ruden writes of another way of how these classic works should be considered, in that, "Plath was not a cool, ethical observer of romantic coupling, wifehood, and motherhood, standing outside of those things like Jane Austen, or outside the conventional family like Virginia Woolf. She was not an experienced partisan of women's traditional fate either, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or someone with no personal interest in it, like Willa Cather. She was not a victim of eroticism, like Katherine Mansfield, or of domesticity, like Shirley Jackson. And she was not like the more recent authors for whom questions of women's choices and their consequences shrank to manageable size where their own lives were concerned: Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison are examples. No: Plath both created and embodied the Homeric or Vergilian myth of womanhood, of the hero who has been to the underworld and seen the unspeakable realities, yet speak of them; she became both the image and the reality of the woman warrior, who, like Camilla, fights the losing battle to the end and triumphs through her undying fame. This is who so many readers have long regarded her as something more than just an author, why her story seems to have a significance touching on the metaphysical."

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