How I Critique Essays About Sylvia Plath

The tears of a Weeping Scholar Tree (Sophora japonica).

I love reading Sylvia Plath scholarship and indulge when its focus intrigues me, or for pleasure. When an essay's research, prose, and arc of argument strike me as flawless, I marvel as I do at Olympic gymnastics. Scholarship is the uneven-bars of language, elegant, defiant, and it finishes with flair and says: How did I do? 

I want to write like that. Planning a post this week about why Sylvia Plath loved food, I read the essays  "Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops: Sylvia Plath and Food" by Lynda K. Bundtzen, anthologized in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022) and "Plath and Food," by Gerard Woodward, published in Sylvia Plath in Context (2013), edited by Dr. Tracy Brain.

I'd avoided for years sitting down with Sylvia Plath in Context, pouting because a book with that title should include an essay about Plath's background and family. Didn't those count as context? To me they do. Please note that I am such a Tracy Brain fan I had her autograph my copy of The Other Sylvia Plath.

They look a bit like Ted and Sylvia.

But I now read "Plath and Food." Poet and novelist Woodward chose to count Plath's references to food and eating, finding that about one-third of Plath's poems refer to one or the other ("black as burnt turkey"). As we say in Missouri, "Well, butter me and call me a biscuit," because I had planned to state that there's no Plath poem about food, although this unpublished early poem, soon to be seen in The Complete Poems, would probably qualify:

(Wondering if Plath was told, 'You will sit here until you eat it'

) 

Woodward wrote with English authority about postwar English recipes Plath lampooned as "Lard and stale bread pie, garnished with pig's feet." Ted Hughes praised her fine cooking but complained when meals were too fancy or too light.

Bundzten's "Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops" feasts us on Plath's descriptions of the foods Plath bought, anticipated, cooked, served, and savored, the poet even providing for them dazzling new adjectives. And she packed her face when eating other people's food. Delightful. Maybe Plath would have conquered the  'slicks ' as a food writer. 

Not only a "woman singer," Plath was the offspring of food-service and hospitality workers. Food was the family business. Plath's maternal great-grandparents boarded tourists in their Tyrolean pension. Her "Grampy" was a headwaiter. Her German father Otto worked in a New York grocery and a deli. Plath's Viennese grandmother worked in her parents' store and cooked hearty European food and bakery, which Plath replicated in her own household. Plath's uncle Henry's deli in Boston employed several other Schobers, and Henry and three Greenwood uncles scattered across the U.S. were professional waitstaff and restaurant managers.

We picture fin-de-siecle immigrants as miners and subsistence farmers, but the Plaths, Greenwoods, and Schobers arrived from Europe as service workers, white people visible and legible to the white privileged class. This, plus marriages to U.S.-born citizens, created for Sylvia's generation a great advantage: access to those privileges, but only if the kids did everything right.

So Plath's generation was assigned to do everything right. That's the struggle she lived with and wrote about, not about the German-speaking family she felt burdened by and did not live to appreciate beyond its work ethic and food. Each time I read a new Plath essay, I wonder if it will acknowledge the fullness of her heritage, which shows up in her life in other and more consequential ways.