Sylvia Plath
07/2019
mental-health feminist
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep (56)
"Esther, have you ever seen a man?"... Then he just stood theere in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and gizzards and I felt very depressed. (69)
I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her up again (66)
I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street in a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone (77)
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socratise and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs ere many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet (77)
I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband. It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him egs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my night gown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed utterly exhausted. This seemed like a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like (84)
I had never met a woman-hater before. I could tell Marco was a woman-hater, because in spite of all the models and TV starlets in the room that night he paid attention to nobody but me. Not out of kindness or even curiosity, but because I'd happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards (106)
"I don't see what women see in other women," I told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?" Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness." That shut me up. (219)
This book was quite good. It was not great for me, I began to lose steam with it as the main character begins to lose their mind. The book slowly starts to go off the rails, which is very real and articulated well. But makes the main character harder to relate to, as her reality is increasingly different from my own.
There was a bunch of stuff in the first few chapters of the book where she is in New York City, working the magazine internship, and she describes all the clothes she is wearing the aesthetic of the things which surround her. I remember being shocked at the extensive vocabulary that I was actually unaware of. I did not know what some of these colors were or what the patterns described looked or felt like. For example: Doreen looked terrific. Shee was wearing a strapless white lace dress zipped up over a snug corset affair... I wore a black shantung sheath that cost my forty dollars. ..."We're on our way to a party," I blurted out, since Doreen had gone suddenly dumb as a post and was fiddling in a blaise way with her white lace pocketbook cover (7,8)
The feminist remarks were also really interesting. She make comments about how she has absolutely no interest in becoming a wife, how that sounds boring and terrible. She says it so plainly. This book was published in 1971. I feel like ideas like this really must have shaped a lot of the empowerment-of-women momentum we feel today.