"The Shadow Knows"

From Sylvia Plath's short story "The Shadow" (1959):

"Prepared as I was for the phenomenon of evil in the world, I was not ready to have it expand in this treacherous fashion, like some uncontrollable fungus, beyond the confines of half-hour radio programs, comic book covers, and Saturday afternoon double features, to drag out past all confident predictions of a smashing-quick finish. 

"I had an ingrained sense of the powers of good protecting me: my parents, the police, the FBI, the American Armed Forces; even those symbolic champions of Good from a cloudier hinterland -- The Shadow, Superman, and the rest. Not to mention God himself. Surely, with these ranked round me, circle after concentric circle, reaching to infinity, I had nothing to fear. Yet I was afraid. Clearly, in spite of my assiduous study of the world, there was something I had not been told; some piece to the puzzle I did not have in hand."

I paid no attention to the above passage until recently.

"The Shadow" is an anti-hero detective character who gets revenge on evildoers. He starred in a radio show popular from the 1930s until 1954, remembered for its famous taglines, including "crime does not pay." From 1937 Orson Welles voiced the character [listen]. Young Sylvia Plath and her brother Warren were among the Shadow's millions of fans.

Plath spun up the story from a childhood memory: "Feeling of badness in the world unconquerable by good; war, death, disease; horror radio programs." [Journals, 28 December 1958].

"The Shadow," The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, P. Steinberg, ed., pp. 382-389.

Sylvia Plath Quotations From "Letters Home"

"Simply gutted of all strength and energy. I wear about five sweaters and wool pants and knee socks and can't stop my teeth chattering. The gas fire eats up the shillings and scalds one side and the other freezes like the other half of the moon. I was simply not made for this kind of weather. I have had enough of their sickbay and hospitals to make me think it is better to perish in one's own home. . . " (1956, February 24) 

"When one feels like leaving college and killing oneself over one course which actually nauseates me, it is a rather serious thing." (1952, November 19)

"I can't wait to get out of this dusty, dirty coalbin of a house" (1957, May 5)

"[a]ll the other little 'creative' writers were similarly dismissed, but I was singled out for particularly vicious abuse" (1957, June 8)

"I am sacrificing my energy, writing, and versatile intellectual life for grubbing over 66 Hawthorne papers a week and trying to be articulate in front of a rough class of spoiled bitches." (1957, November 5)

"Oh, we have rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs and Ted with missing earlobes. . ." (1958, June 11)

"I lost the little baby this morning and feel really terrible about it." (1961, February 6)

"The next five months are grim ones." (1961, November 5)

"I got so awfully depressed two weeks ago by reading two issues of The Nation--Juggernaut, the Warfare State--all about the terrifying marriage of big business and the military in America and the forces of the John Birch Society, etc.; and then another article about the repulsive shelter craze for fallout, all very factual, documented, and true, that I simply couldn't sleep for nights with all the warlike talk in the papers" (1961, December 7)

"I simply cannot go on living the degraded and agonized life I have been living, which has stopped my writing and just about ruined my sleep and my health" (1962, August 27)

"I guess my predicament is an astounding one, a deserted wife knocked out by flu with two babies and a full-time job" (1962, October 18)

The next time you hear or read that Aurelia Plath's edit of Sylvia Plath's Letters Home (1975) "expurgated" "everything negative or political" in Sylvia's letters and made Sylvia's life and character look sunny and sweet, "like a child's pink frilly bedroom". . . send them this page of quotations from Letters Home.