IMAX Authorship: Teaching Plath and Her Unabridged Journals

Confessional poets never did cooperate with theoretical interment. Whether we see them as amplifiers of their own emotion (Yezzi 1998), representative victims (Breslin 1987), chroniclers of middle-class family angst (Middlebrook 1993), or harbingers of postwar privacy debates (Nelson 2002), confessional poets refuse to disappear into the signifying process of their texts. The personages of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and especially Sylvia Plath seem to be hardwired into their signature poems. Indeed, Plath’s texts have a palpable authorial presence that becomes freakish and alluring, singular and symbolic. In the past five years, her manifestations have multiplied in literary and popular culture. Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) and Plath’s own Unabridged Journals (2000a) prompted publicity in magazines as diverse as the New Yorker, Vogue, and People Weekly. Ryan Adams’s song “Sylvia Plath” (2002) tapped her status as a cult figure. And as Lynn Neary (2003) reported on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, a trio of texts released in October 2003 attests to our forty-year fascination with Plath’s life and writings: Kate Moses’s biographical novel Wintering (2000a), Diane Middlebrook’s psychological biography Her Husband (2003), and Christine Jeff ’s film Sylvia (2003). The poet has reanimated more than her mythic Lady Lazarus. Five years after Plath’s apparently premature burial, Roland Barthes (1988 1977: 145) foresaw “the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage.” In a reverse image of the incredibly shrinking