All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers(10)

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.

In the New York Review of Books, Terry Castle goes so far as to blame Sylvia for the suicide of her son Nicholas in Alaska forty-six years after her own death. The facts that Alaska has the second-highest rate of suicide of any US state and that mental illness is widely accepted as genetic were immaterial, apparently, in the face of an opportunity to use the turn of phrase “Lady Lazarus caught up with him at last.” It is clever and spooky indeed, but it is hardly fair. That Castle uses the same piece to accuse Sylvia of making “a sensation still (sometimes) among bulimic female undergraduates” is but one of the scores of dismissals of life-threatening illness among young women as frivolous lifestyle habits.4

I was such an undergraduate, unknowingly worshipping at the altar of Sylvia before I formed the bridge in my mind from her work to her face and legacy. I regret not having been one of her apostles as a girl, but I am glad to have found her when I did: in my late twenties and on a mission of almost evangelical zeal to make the emotions of young women not just visible in the literary world but to make them essential components of it. Sylvia’s work had lingered in my periphery as it did for many girls who had not been assigned The Bell Jar in school but who managed to find her image sprinkled across the sadder corner of the women’s Internet.

I began frequenting anorexia and bulimia blogs in the late 1990s in the hopes of catching one of the few diseases that people actively covet. In an age before ubiquitous digital photography, these online shrines to eating disorders were home to meticulously curated collections of images scanned from magazines alongside quotes that ennobled the disease with a sense of almost divine purpose. A quote from Sylvia’s poem “In Plaster” made frequent appearances. “She doesn’t need food, she is one of the real saints,” it read, ripped brutally from its context in a poem about battling a personified disorder but ultimately starving the sickness to its own death. One of the most famous images of Sylvia served as the avatar for many users of the blogging platform LiveJournal, which I followed in the early 2000s, along with images of Twiggy and Brigitte Bardot.

I am glad that I found Sylvia by accidentally falling down a hole of her words alone, unstrangled by their troubling literary legacy. I was searching for a clever turn of phrase I knew was hers to quote to a man when I was twenty-nine years old. I didn’t know if it came from a novel or from her diaries, so I was looking up her quotes on the website Goodreads. The site is a helpful cheat sheet for those of us who appear to have read far more than we have; it features book reviews, quotes, and synopses of books and also serves as an odd consortium of legitimate bibliophiles and bizarrely resentful readers alike. Somehow I missed The Bell Jar in my formal education but saw it on enough bookshelves at friends’ homes to intuit that it was something I needed to eventually find time for on an extracurricular basis.