Dying for Melodrama

Thirty years after her suicide, Sylvia Plath continues to seduce the adolescent psyche. But her fans are just as likely to romanticize her death as they are her poetry.

By Alissa Quart, published on November 01, 2003 - last reviewed on February 14, 2008

Sylvia Plath is American poetry's lone 20th-century celebrity. We have largely forgotten the lives of once famed public poets such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. But many years after her death, we are still enthralled with the 1950s sweater girl who transformed herself into the poetic persona of Lady Lazarus.

Plath's continued popularity can be chalked up to both the emotional immediacy of her confessional poems, and a biography that careens from apple-cheeked sorority sister to suicide at age 30. The combination continues to intoxicate three groups in particular: script writers, biographers and angst-ridden teens.

No surprise, then, that this is once again the season of Sylvia Plath. Gwyneth Paltrow starred as the poet in the film Sylvia. Off-Broadway offered a less pretty version of Plath's life, with the one-woman show Edge. The teeming canon of Plath biographies expanded with Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, Portrait of A Marriage. Plath is even name-checked on television and in a song by rocker Ryan Adams. On an episode of the television show Gilmore Girls, the show's clean teen heroine Rory reads Plath's diaries.

And real teens continue to love Plath. Jesse Cordes Selbin, a 16-year-old in Georgetown, Texas, first read Plath's novel The Bell Jar when she was 14. The roman à clef was a gift from Selbin's mom, herself a former die-hard Plath fan. "Plath is so good at gory, descriptively gross things," says the teen. For her, The Bell Jar is not just a novel about teenage crack-ups. It's a novel, in a sense, about Selbin herself.

The Bell Jar tracks high-achieving Plath stand-in Esther Greenwood, who despite her conventional achievements—high marks at an elite college, an internship at Mademoiselle magazine, a number of suitors—is alternately despairing and independent-minded. Esther is also fueled by contempt for other girls, those who merely dream of being hat makers or paramours, while she aspires to be a poet.

The Bell Jar captures the minute details of middle-class teendom: the struggle to excel at a summer internship, the feeling of being a social outcast, the awkwardness of not knowing how to act at restaurants and bars and, inevitably, sexual anxiety.

"Esther is an outcast," says Selbin. "If you are an outcast teenager, you want to identify with someone who feels the same way—that's not Miss Popularity and her crowd."

Twenty-first-century teens' belief that they've found a kindred outsider in Plath is evident in the thousands of Internet sites and Web logs that now celebrate the poet. Some girls dub their journals "bell jar" or "ladylazarus." On plathonline.com, girls with e-mail addresses like sylviaaplath, plath2002 and LuvlySylviaPlath feel that the poet speaks the truth and speaks it only to them.

They write of how they are the only students in their English classes who really understand and appreciate Plath. They write of their aspiration to be like her. One notes, "I love Sylvia... she's my favorite... ever since 7th grade... me and Sylvia all the way." Terry Zlabinger, a longtime English teacher at the American International School in Vienna, Austria, finds that "there are always females who feel they 'own' the emotions Plath describes and so respond very personally to the poems. Then they discover The Bell Jar and dive into that. They love her tragic story."

Some girls were disgusted that Paltrow portrayed their idol. "I think this movie is the wrong kind of recognition... Gwyneth Paltrow. Eww," one girl writes, perhaps thinking the flaxen-haired Paltrow too much of a Hollywood darling to do a plausible rendition of the poet. "If I was dead and she was playing me in a movie, I'd roll over in my grave." Indeed, in Sylvia, Paltrow's open smile and sad-but-pretty poses evince little of the dark, venomous intelligence for which Plath is famous.

Plath's writing experiments with identity and the search for an authentic voice. And it's the poet's skill at conveying this search—a quest that is conducted through thinking about living as well as thinking about dying—that continues to draw teenagers to the cult of Plath. In the poem "Daddy," she plies a favorite theme: trying to find herself in the murk of her Oedipal drama: "I was ten when they buried you/At twenty, I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you/I thought even the bones would do."

Todd Schultz, a professor of psychology at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, who has written extensively on Sylvia Plath, believes that "supersensitive" young women may find Plath liberating because she attempts to resist traditional female roles, all the while struggling against her ingrained perfectionism. After The Bell Jar's heroine has a nervous breakdown, she sheds her identity as an emotionally repressed overachiever and starts telling the truth to wrong-headed authority figures and hypocritical peers. It is in part this acerbic "truth-telling" that attracts teenagers. Angelica Torn, the star of the Plath biographical one-act play Edge, recalls being drawn into the Plath fold at age 14 by The Bell Jar's "brutal reality."