A good, plain, very resourceful woman

“The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.”
Plath on Lady Lazarus, as part of a script for a BBC broadcast which never took place...


Trying to write an academic paper as part of the phd application--It's been almost ten years since I did my MFA and I somehow lost what little academic writing I did then, and while I've been teaching expository over these years, I've done little to none of it myself. I joked with a poet friend the other day that I was going to try to write something about Plath because I was looking for unmoored territory. Like Dickinson, so many have this voracious hunger to claim her, and I am not divorced from that. Threads of her story weave through the life of any woman who writes, and these are bright red threads: my aunt went to high school with her; my own mother remembers the town gossip after her first hospitalization. At Yaddo, I wrote in her writing room and fell in love with a poet who was given Ted Hughes and her bedroom. My ex is about to publish a novel called Lady Lazarus. (I'll say no more about that.) Even if I didn't find her work endlessly important and enormously admirable, the ghost of her drama was bound to intersect my own.

What strikes me the most as I immerse myself in her writing and her life, is that despite the tragic trajectory of her demise, she was, as she describes her persona, a very resourceful woman, and a very ambitious one. Her will to live immortally ultimately surpassed her will to get up in the morning "before the glassy music of the milkmen."