Holding Sylvia

About a week ago I had the rare privilege of holding and looking over some of Sylvia Plath's papers at the Lilly Library. I was there with a class, and we had read and discussed Ariel in its original and restored editions. We'd talked about the artist and the artist's life, how the two commingle profitably or miserably. And we'd talked about reading into and beyond the myth of Plath - I for one had so many hang-ups about Plath's notoriety that it was hard to read her. But ultimately, I find her work exemplary, expecially in terms of transforming the merely confessional, through drafts, to the archetypal.

But the most memorable moment came for me looking over one of her scrapbooks. She had written excessively dramatic captions for her photos: "Sue paying homage to Apollo upon a sun-dappled cairn in Devon", "My dearest Jill, striking an Aphrodite pose at the piano", etc. The archivist remarked that this degree of performativity seemed vain. "It's as though she was writing for people who would consider this worth reading once she was famous," she said.

I couldn't help but recognize myself in Plath's self-aggrandizement. Blurring the distinctions of real life and performance, I seek to enlarge my life. Maybe it's not so much that the dramatics are meant to titillate future readers as they are meant to titillate myself. And I defend the choice thus: seeking to invest my life with artifice, I personalize it according to my own aesthetic. And I may find elements of beauty where a plainer view would find none.