Introduction
“The death girls”: Plath, Sexton, and the Woman Reader in Literary History
In 2003, I completed work on an essay called “The ‘Priestess’ and Her ‘Cult’: Plath’s Confessional
Poetics and the Mythology of Women Readers,” which eventually made its way into print in Anita
Helle’s 2007 collection The Unraveling Archives: Essays on Sylvia Plath. This essay marked my first
sustained exploration into the topic of Plath’s readers. It begins with a brief description of the figure of
Kat Stratford, one of the central characters of the film 10 Things I Hate About You. Kat caught my
attention because on two different occasions in the film she is depicted as a Plath reader; she is even
shown sitting in her family room chair reading The Bell Jar. In my examination of Kat in my essay for The
Unraveling Archive, I explained my interest in the question of Plath’s readership as embodied by the
character of Kat this way: “As a scholar who once devoured Plath’s writings in daily doses, I am intrigued
by this figure of the Plath reader.”
At the time of its composition, the statement certainly seemed good enough. A little revelatory
perhaps, but an honest statement of how I saw my relationship to Plath’s work back then. Four years of
research and a book later, however, and the statement gives me great pause. Part of me wishes I could
take it back or at least footnote it. I would do so not because it lacks truth, but because it does work I
did not intend it to do. I wrote the statement to convey a literal reality: my interest in Kat Stratford
springs at least partially from my recognition of me in her. That is to say, I find Kat interesting because I
see my own younger self and early interest in Plath’s writing reflected in her image. When I first
discovered Plath’s poetry in a college poetry workshop (“Tulips” was my introduction to her work), I was
struck by the originality of her voice and the authenticity of the emotions her images conveyed. I don’t
remember if it was immediately thereafter or not, but before too long, I sought out her other work. My
most vivid memory of myself as a Plath reader is the Saturday I spent reading The Bell Jar on the living
room sofa of my mother’s house, chuckling at the scene where Esther tries, rather clumsily, to strangle
herself by wrapping her robe belt around her throat and pulling. The following Saturday I re-read the
novel, launching what would eventually become a singular scholarly interest, one that took me from
senior thesis, to numerous graduate seminar papers, to dissertation, to book.
In describing myself as one who “devoured Plath’s writing in daily doses,” I meant to capture
this early interest, which, though it has evolved and taken different shapes over the years, has never
waned. I am still struck by the originality of Plath’s voice and the authenticity of her emotions. Yet I do
regret the statement, for reasons this whole book is really designed to explain. For those looking for a
more concise explanation, let me try to synthesize the reasons for my desire for redaction here.
While I meant my statement to reveal the literal truth of my interest in Plath’s writings, the
work of this book has revealed to me the troubling overdetermination of the tropes I chose to convey
that interest. What I didn’t realize in 2003 was that, by describing my reading of Plath as a process of
daily devouring, I had stepped into the very boggish mythology that would become the focus of my
research: a mythology that relies on similar tropes to cast Plath’s and Sexton’s women readers as
consumers, cannibals and addicts. Let me clarify. It’s not that I was unaware of the existence of such
tropes as they applied to Plath and Sexton’s work. I had seen them used before, by none less than
Sandra Gilbert who in 1978 published an essay entitled “A Fine White, Flying Myth: Confessions of a
Plath Addict,” and probably heard them come from the mouths of people I met who also had a strong
interest in Plath’s and Sexton’s writings.i What I was unaware of is the historicity of such tropes and
their participation in a much larger discourse about women readers—a discourse not only about Plath’s
and Sexton’s women readers but about women readers long dead; a discourse so entrenched it
permeates both literary and mainstream worlds, eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first
centuries, and English-speaking and non-English speaking cultures; a discourse so naturalized as to
appear void of its own historicity.
Despite my intentions back then, my statement evokes this discourse, which might not be such a
regrettable result if it weren’t for the troubling nature of the discourse’s historicity, including its
saturation of ungenerous, even unkind, accounts of women’s reading practices and the misogyny that
often underwrites those accounts. Indeed, while my use of the tropes of consumption and addiction
were chosen to convey my full engagement with Plath’s writing as a young undergraduate—and
engagement that has become the basis of a career in literary studies— such tropes have been used
historically to convey just the opposite: an uncritical relationship to texts that can lead to disastrous
consequences. More often than not throughout history, such acts of uncritical consumption are
attributed to women readers. By the 1970s, such acts are commonly attributed to one set of women
readers in particular: those who read Plath’s and Sexton’s work.
Take, for example, Susan Wood’s 1978 (check date?) review of Anne Sexton’s Words for Dr. Y.:
Uncollected Poems, in which Wood asks and answers an apparently simple question about the
posthumous publication:
Who will buy this book? I think, from hearing them speak at poetry readings and in
poetry workshops, it is primarily young girls and women who admire Sexton for all the
wrong reasons, making her a martyr to art and feminism; who seem, out of their own
needs, to identify with her pathological self-loathing and to romanticize it into heroism.
It has very little to do with poetry and it does neither poetry nor Anne Sexton a service.
(3)
For Wood, the question is not whether this book of Sexton’s previously uncollected poems will find an
audience to justify its publication. The question is whether it will find the right audience. Indeed, Wood
worries that the book can only find the wrong kind of reader, attracting “primarily young girls and
women” who, blinded by illness or feminist ideology, fail to understand how such a work should be
properly read or valued and in the process endanger Sexton’s reputation as a serious poet.
Encapsulating the discourse about women readers that frequently underlies discussions of
Sexton’s and Plath’s works, Wood’s review not only genders Sexton’s readers but it also pathologizes
them and assesses them as uncritical consumers of her writing. Such a construction ought not to
surprise anyone in touch with popular culture from the past few decades. Having made numerous
cameos in films, television shows, and popular novels, including Natural Born Killers, Law and Order,
Family Guy, and White Oleander, to name just a few, Plath’s and Sexton’s women readers have become
a well-tried stereotype. This stereotype has even served as the foundation for an entire novel, Meg
Wolitzer’s 1982 novel Sleepwalking, which centers on a cohort of three female Swarthmore students,
Naomi, Laura, and Claire, who are obsessed, respectively, with Plath, Sexton, and a fictional poet named
Lucy Ascher, who published terribly bleak “death landscapes” before killing herself at the age of 23?.
Known on their campus as the “death girls,” this particular collection of young women readers
exemplifies the very terms by which literary and popular culture has come to understand Plath’s and
Sexton’s readership.
The prologue to the novel establishes these terms from the outset, opening with a depiction of
the women’s all-night death-talks, complete with candles and the recitation of Plath, Sexton, and Ascher
poems, during which “They talked about death as if it were a county in Europe”, from which they “could
simply fly home bearing rolls of color film and tourist anecdotes.”ii Underscoring the women’s distorted
view of death, the novel depicts their night-time poetry reading as a near “religious experience,” so
hypnotic in its effect that it was “as though they were being lulled into an easy trance.”iii Furthermore,
these ritual poetry readings are the center of the young women’s lives; everything else was just time
that had to be passed until “The sun came down over the trees and the death girls started to wake, to
come to life.” Recognizing this obsession with death in each other, “As freshmen they had banded
together, apparently drawn to each other by the lure of some secret signal as unintelligible to everyone
else as the pitch of a dog whistle is to human beings.”iv Even their bodies betray their difference or
oddity. When they laugh, they are “joyless,”v and as the narrator tells us, they “could easily be
indentified from several yards away by the clash of a winter-white face with a perennial black
turtleneck.”vi Not surprisingly, they are the objects of jokes among their classmates, who regard the
three women as living in a “some dream world” of “depressing women’s poetry.”vii
While the novel at times complicates the stereotype established so thoroughly in the prologue,
in Claire’s case providing motivation for her obsession with Ascher’s bleak poetry by recounting her
teenage brother’s death, it certainly doesn’t seem interested in challenging the stereotype. For the most
part, the image of the three women that emerges from the prologue carries through the entire novel.
From start to finish, they are depicted as dark and humorless. Even “bright-eyed”viii Julian, Claire’s
boyfriend and the character who serves as the emblem of normality throughout the novel, can’t recall a
time when he actually saw “one of them smile.” As he puts it, “Their faces just weren’t cut out for it.”ix
More importantly, their dark, humorless personalities are depicted as inextricably linked to their reading
practices. In recounting to Julian her parents’ concern over her engrossment in Lucy Ascher’s poems,
Claire describes the impossibility of stopping. In the narrator’s words, “she simply could not close the
book; she was drawn to it with a pull she had never felt before.” Underscoring the idea of reading as
addiction, Claire tells Julian,
I used to read those poems the minute I woke up. The night before, I would select a
poem to be read in the morning, and I would put the book on my night table . . . When I
woke up I would slowly remember the poem waiting for me, and I would open the book
and read it lying there in my bed, barely awake. I didn’t even get up to brush my teeth
or pee or anything but just read the poem through, and it really made me feel good.x
Similarly, when Claire’s mother confronts her about that “thing you have for that woman poet,” Claire
screams internally “It is not a thing! . . . It is everything; it is my life.” And the narrator echoes, “The
earth split apart for Claire when she first read Lucy Ascher.”xi
As Claire’s thoughts and the narrator’s commentary suggest, the young women’s interest in
Plath’s, Sexton’s, and Ascher’s poetry transcends the boundaries of reading. Just reading their chosen
author’s books is not enough; their obsessions are so complete that they must attempt to insert
themselves into what remains of their author’s life. In Naomi’s case, this involves voyeuristically
watching Plath’s surviving mother come and go from her house, in Laura’s case, kneeling at Sexton’s
gravestone, and in Claire’s case, becoming a housekeeper for Lucy Ascher’s grieving parents. As these
actions portend, their reading of poetry, if not already, quickly becomes pathological. We learn from a
memory recounted that Naomi’s reading of The Bell Jar in high school sent her into a sleepless “manic
stupor.”xii As she puts it her retelling of the experience to Julian,
When I was in high school, I read the book and it really shook me up. I was valedictorian
of my class and a National Merit Scholar, and I suddenly realized that all the awards and
prizes I’d been racking up meant absolutely nothing. Zilch. I’d been pushing ahead of
everybody for years, like Plath, and I saw that none of it would mean anything in the
long run, that I would die like everyone else. . . . I was very tempted to go to Smith—
that’s where Sylvia went—but part of me was scared. I thought if I went there, I might
be following in her footsteps or something. . . . I thought I might go off the dead end.xiii
While Naomi seems to have avoided the pitfall, eventually giving up being a death girl by the novel’s
end, Laura, the Sexton reader throughout the novel, ends up in just such a position. When we last hear
of her, she is seeing a psychiatrist, taking Valium, and “l[ying] around all day, depressed.”xiv Claire
appears to escape such a fate largely, if not entirely, because of Julian’s intervention. Concerned for
what her incursion on the Ascher parents might mean for her well-being once he learns about it, Julian
“retrieve[s]” her from the Ascher house, persuading her “There is no such thing as a death girl. . . . Death
girls don’t exist.”xv
Julian’s intervention, combined with Claire’s return home first to her parents and then to
university, compel us to view Claire’s status as death girl critically, which in turn means viewing her
behavior and reading practices as abnormal and unhealthy. While she has suffered loss in her short life,
she has used literature, wrongly, to languish in her grief. Put another way, her reading practices are
presented as a sign of deep psychological problems related to her inability to cope or grieve
appropriately. Naomi and Laura’s reading habits are equally pathological and self-indulgent. Without
personal traumas that explain their misguided reading habits, however, Naomi and Laura appear more
simply as naïve readers, unprepared for the fallout of such self-indulgent reading practices. While
Laura’s fate is left ambiguous, it’s clear that she has at least sought help for her behaviors and appears
to have abandoned her interest in living as a death girl. And as the novel ends, Naomi too has
abandoned the death girls, an abandonment embodied in her decision to grow out her bleached blonde
locks she wore in imitation of Plath, suggesting of course that, while she’s growing out her hair, she’s
also out-growing the kind of self-indulgent reading habits that defined the death girls.
As the larger argument of this book suggests, Claire, Naomi, and Laura exemplify the very terms
by which literary and popular culture has come to understand both Plath’s and Sexton’s readership and
establishes why a study of the discourse surrounding Plath, Sexton, and women readers is so badly
needed. On the one hand, the death girls, as their title suggests, are meant to evoke a stereotype. When
the novel’s narrator first puts forward the image of a band of death-girls who have been “lured”
together by a sound audible only to themselves, as if they were dogs, and who accent their sun-deprived
skin with black turtlenecks, it is meant not simply to draw laughs but to elicit a particular response from
readers, a nod of recognition, a “Yes, I know the type.” Yet one is reluctant to dismiss the image as mere
stereotype, for this band of death girls exists as the center of an entire novel—and by most accounts, a
successful one. Such a role is an uncommon position for mere stereotypes to occupy, and it suggests
that the death girls share an uneasy relationship with reality.
Indeed, as I discuss in the final chapter of this book, the Plath reader’s presence is palpable and
historical, even as she is circumscribed by stereotype and cliché. That she appears to exist
simultaneously as both actual reader and mere stereotype makes her all the more intriguing. . . . .
What Sleepwalking encapsulates, in fact, is the degree to which Plath’s and Sexton’s readership,
largely assumed to be a common readership, has evolved into a cultural and literary mythology. In using
the term, I mean to evoke not the legendary status of this figure of the Plath-Sexton reader, though the
issue is relevant to my examination. Rather, my use of the term draws specifically on the work of Roland
Barthes, whose ideas about the relationship between myth, history, and language allows us to better
understand the process through which an image of a group of college-age readers could develop into
the reservoir of signification it has become. Mythology operates at the level of second-order
signification.
In its investigation of this evolution, my introduction also provides a framework for
understanding the concept of mythology à la Roland Barthes and other cultural studies theorists, whose
From intro to popular culture: myth is vital to the mindset of the culture which holds it and thus
is significant and long-lasting (check source); they grow out of “very real historical events and
circumstances”. TRANSITION INTO HISTORY OF WOMEN READERS:
The use of the figure of a woman reader as a repository of meaning is hardly a new
phenomenon, and it certainly isn’t particular to Plath and Sexton’s audiences. Not only must we ask
questions about the relationship between the figure of the Plath-Sexton reader and Plath and Sexton’s
real audience, but we must also explore its relationship to our understanding of the history of women’s
reading, including past constructions of women readers. As I discuss in chapter one, anxieties about
Plath’s and Sexton’s audience exist coterminously with anxieties about the Women’s Movement of the
1970s and the incursion of women writers and readers upon the literary markets that came with it. Any
account of the construction of Plath’s and Sexton’s audience has to address this relationship. At the
same time, historicizing the Plath Sexton reader must go beyond synchronic examinations to include a
diachronic perspective, that is, an understanding of how our discourse about women readers today has
been shaped by discourses of the past.
The explosion of scholarship on the subject of the pre-twentieth century woman reader over the
past two decades puts this kind of broader examination within easy reach. The seminal book of this
explosion, Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader 1837-1914, provides one of the most comprehensive and
thoroughly researched studies of the woman reader in the nineteenth century.
as well as my own research into paintings of women readers from the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, I tease out the connections between the anxieties underlying constructions of the PlathSexton reader and the anxieties that have long underlay our understanding of women readers
throughout literary history. One connection that interests me especially, for example, is the
pathologizing of women’s reading practices—that is, the act of defining women’s reading
symptomatically, either as a sign of illness or as a potential cause of it. My goal in identifying such
connections is not to dehistoricize nineteenth-century discourse, but rather to demonstrate the ways
the mythology of the Plath-Sexton reader participates in a long-standing discourse about women
readers. Illuminating its participation in this discourse, I believe, is the essential first step in moving Plath
and Sexton studies past its blinding preoccupation with women readers.
To understand this mythology, it’s crucial to look not simply at synchronic examples, but
diachronic ones as well . . .
To turn now to the diachronic perspective, I want to provide a brief overview of the role women readers
have played in literary history more generally.
INSERT DISCUSSION OF THIS HISTORY, bibliographic overview
My project, which borrows its title from Wood’s review, examines this construction of what I call
the “Plath-Sexton reader,” tracing its evolutions throughout literary and popular culture, in order to
demonstrate the significant effect it has had on the production, reception, and evaluation of Plath’s and
Sexton’s oeuvres. What I question, in other words, is not the assumption that women readers constitute
a large portion of these two writers’ audiences, but rather how this assumption has evolved into a
mythology about women readers and how this mythology, in turn, has shaped and even sustained Plath
and Sexton studies.
I argue, for example, that this mythology of women readers has driven, and continues to drive,
the direction of Plath and Sexton scholarship, leading to its dismissal of (auto)biographical approaches
to their work, as well as its rejection of the label “confessional”; that this mythology helps to explain the
anxieties underlying the themes that emerge in Sexton’s later writings, particularly her fear that she had
become merely a consumed commodity, rather than a serious literary figure; and that this mythology
has influenced Ted and now daughter Frieda Hughes’s management of Plath’s writings, including their
decisions about when and how to release her work. In short, I argue that this mythology of women
readers has been the very grounds on which Plath’s and Sexton’s value as authors has been determined.
INSERT DISCUSSION ABOUT MYTHOLOGY AND WHY I AM USING THE TERM A LA BARTHES, and
also about my use of discourse—what it is I am examining, how tropes migrate, etc.
OR INSERT HISTORY HERE??
To illustrate this argument, I begin by tracking the preoccupation with women readers that pervades
reviews and criticism of Plath’s and Sexton’s work, focusing closely on the trope of uncritical
consumption that defines this preoccupation and the central role it plays in the literary establishment’s
debates about the aesthetic merits of their publications. Next, I analyze specific examples of the PlathSexton reader, beginning with fictional depictions of young women reading The Bell Jar in television
shows, Hollywood films, and mainstream contemporary novels, and moving to historical examples from
the fan culture surrounding both writers. When taken together, my examinations of these literary,
historical, and cultural constructions of the Plath-Sexton reader reveal, not simply the persistent nature
of her association with uncritical reading practices, but also the extent to which our collective
preoccupation with this figure of the woman reader has constrained and circumscribed discussions of
Plath’s and Sexton’s work, leading, for example, to reviews and critical approaches, such as the one by
Susan Wood, that seem to be inspired principally by a desire to protect Plath and Sexton from readers
who do them and their work harm.
Throughout the second half of the book, I examine the effects of this preoccupation with
readership on Sexton’s later writings and on Plath’s posthumous career. With Sexton, I focus especially
on how her later poetry and prose turn away from her early view of the reader as a co-participant in her
poetry’s aesthetic and reveal instead her own preoccupation with and internalization of the
construction of her readers as “consumers” who demand that she “pass out bits of [her] heart like hors
d’oeuvres” (“The Ambition Bird” 32). With Plath, I similarly trace this trope of consumption, focusing, in
this case, on the Plath estate’s perception of her readers as “dogs” that “devour” her writing and
destroy her reputation. In particular, I examine Ted and Frieda Hughes’s public statements about Plath’s
readers, including the poems, prose, and editorials they have written on the subject, as well as their
decisions about when and how to publish Plath’s writing—decisions that seem calculated, ironically, to
capitalize on the very consumer eschewed in their public statements.
Finally, the book ends with a discussion of those real readers who are presumed to be the
mimetic foundation for the mythology.
This focus on readers throughout Who Will Buy This Book? is interventionist by design, aiming to
move Plath and Sexton studies forward in several, much-needed ways. Indeed, what has motivated this
project from its conception is my fear that, for the most part, Plath and Sexton studies has become
bogged down in its obsession with repairing the damage that has allegedly resulted from both authors’
association with the confessional school, biographical criticism, and especially young women readers. To
pull us from the bog, I approach Plath and Sexton primarily from two theoretical directions: cultural
studies and reception theory, which together provide the grounds for examining texts and issues
previously overlooked by Plath and Sexton scholars. While past criticism has given cursory treatment to
the question of Plath’s and Sexton’s reception, focusing on whether works were received well or not, my
study conducts a close analysis of the reviews themselves and thus sheds new light on the reception of
their work by uncovering the anxieties about women readers—and the related trope of consumption—
that give shape to the literary judgments. It also illuminates the deep relevance of texts that, at first
glance, may seem insignificant, including films and television shows that have made use of the image of
the Plath-Sexton reader, Ted and Frieda Hughes’s writings on the subject of Plath’s readers, and
selections from Sexton’s later writings (some still unpublished) that have been dismissed as Sexton’s
weakest work. What emerges from my approach is not simply a new paradigm for thinking about Plath
and Sexton as individual authors, but a new paradigm for thinking about Plath and Sexton together as
two authors whose oeuvres, regardless of whether they are categorized as confessional or not, have
been defined in no small part by the shared readership they’ve attracted. That is, while recent criticism
on both women’s work has sought to distance Plath and Sexton from one another and thereby
circumvent the question of their association with a “confessional school,” my work cuts directly through
the question by drawing a connection between the two authors that depends, not on the arguable
confessional content of their writing, but on the mythology about women readers that has given shape
to both Plath and Sexton studies. As such, Who Will Buy This Book? constitutes a distinctive approach
within Plath and Sexton studies that will change the very ways their work is discussed.
At the same time, Who Will Buy This Book? also contributes significantly to the broader fields of literary
studies, women’s studies, and book history. This contribution results, not only from the approaches
outlined in the previous paragraph, but from the efforts I make throughout the book to situate my
arguments about Plath and Sexton within a broader examination of the discourse surrounding women
readers throughout literary history. As I make clear in the introduction to the book, the mythology of
women readers evident in Plath and Sexton studies gathers its energy from the long tradition within
literary history of positioning women readers at the center of debates about literary value and proper
reading practices. By discussing this history at the opening of this project, I establish the degree to which
a mythology of women readers has been both pervasive and persistent, and, in turn, I provide a
framework for understanding how the construction of the Plath-Sexton could become so easily lodged
within literary and popular culture today. In this context, my examination of the construction of Plath’s
and Sexton’s readers serves as a case study of women readers more generally, one that uncovers
another important chapter in our understanding of the role women readers have played in the
production of literature and the formation of literary history. That it does so by focusing on the
discourse surrounding women readers from the past five decades ensures that it will make a unique
contribution to scholarship on book history in particular, which has assumed, with few exceptions, that
cultural anxieties about women readers had dissipated by the early part of the twentieth-century.
Indeed, while criticism from the past thirty years has sought to distance Plath and Sexton from each
other—and distance both from their young women readers—I present a rationale for studying the two
authors together that is based on the evolution of their common readership into cultural and literary
mythology.
i
Sandra Gilbert, “A Fine, White Flying Myth: Confessions of a Plath Addict,” Massachusetts
Review, XIX, 3, (Autumn 1978).
ii
Page 3
iii
Page 6
iv
Page 3
v
Page 6
vi
Page 3
vii
Page 4
viii
Page 21
ix
Page 10
x
Pages 15-16.
xi
Italics in original Page 43.
xii
Page 98.
xiii
Page 174.
xiv
Page 172.
xv
Page 207