The Lighter Side of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Marilyn Shot Gordon Ames Lameyer  June 1954
Sylvia "Marilyn" Shot, Gordon Ames Lameyer, June 1954Courtesy The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

There’s a photograph of Sylvia Plath taken in 1954 on the beach. She’s wearing a white swimsuit and shorts. Her hair is lustrously blonde. She’s propped up on her elbows, her tan legs stretching out behind her, smiling face craning forward—coquettishly?—toward the camera. If you glance at this photo from afar, you might mistake her for Marilyn Monroe.

It’s likely that you have in your mind some image of Sylvia Plath, and it’s almost certainly not this one. Plath suffered from depression, mined that battle in her poetry and in her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, and eventually lost the fight at 30, when she asphyxiated herself by sticking her head in the oven. A phrase often appended to her name is “patron saint.” Of what? Any number of things, all of them gloomy. We remember her not as a Technicolor beach babe, but as a brunette in black and white—pretty but haunted, stylish but demure, her looks as dark and brooding as the writing for which she became so famous.

But Plath actually liked to play around with her appearance. “When she wanted to look more sensual and outgoing and vibrant she would have bright blonde hair,” explains Dorothy Moss, a curator at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. “When she needed to look more intellectual and serious, to be taken seriously in her career, she would dye her hair back to brown.”

Studio photograph of Sylvia Plath (with brown hair), Warren Kay Vantine, 1954

Courtesy of College Archives, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts

It’s a particularly dynamic time to be a fan of Sylvia Plath. In the last several months, scholars have unearthed long-buried Plath poems and a cache of unseen letters written in the last years of her life to her therapist, in which Plath alleges that her husband, Ted Hughes, physically abused her. Later this year, Faber in the U.K. will publish the first volume of Plath’s unabridged letters. In 2018, Kirsten Dunst will direct an adaptation of The Bell Jar starring Dakota Fanning. And this weekend, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., unveils “One Life: Sylvia Plath,” an exhibition of the poet’s visual artifacts, cocurated by Moss and Smith College’s Karen Kukil. It is the first exploration of Plath’s life in an art and history museum.

The exhibition is mounted in a single gallery room and brings together a plethora of relics, culled from the archives at Smith, the poet’s alma mater, and the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library. There are family photographs; a lock of Plath’s hair from her first haircut, tied with a blue ribbon and saved by her mother; her childhood Girl Scout uniform; her typewriter; and the plank of wood that served as her writing desk. There are also drawings and paintings that Plath, who matriculated to Smith intending to be a studio art major, created throughout her life. “I think she always felt conflicted about whether she wanted to develop that talent,” says Moss, “or whether she wanted to throw herself into the writing. She just had this impulse to draw on whatever surface she could find throughout her life.”

Sylvia Plath’s Childhood Ponytail with Mother’s Inscription, August 1945, hair with ribbon ponytail/box

Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

There are whimsical sketches: a sharply observed cafe scene doodled in the margins of Plath’s copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The Betty and Veronica theme appears again in a set of paper dolls Plath made as a child, one fair, the other dark, both wearing vintage underpinnings and surrounded by a constellations of gowns fit for a Jane Austen character.

But much of the artwork reflects an inner turmoil that will be familiar to readers of her poetry and prose. In one drawing from Plath’s teenage years, a blonde figure sits at her desk, crying and reading; in a thought bubble above her head we can see that she’s imagining a grisly scene from World War I. A vaguely Cubist portrait from her senior year of high school shows a woman whose face is divided into jagged planes, one side in shadow, the other illuminated. In a pamphlet that accompanies the show, its curators refer to the face as “mask-like.” That word resurfaces in a 1953 journal entry, also on display. Nestled among the lines of neat printing, Plath pasted a sepia-tone photograph of her own blank young face. “Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it,” she commands the reader (herself?). “It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes; symptoms of the foul decay within.”

“There’s this sense of a duality that she seemed to be playing with in her self-portraiture, that she later writes about,” Moss observes. “A lot of her writing draws on images of mirrors and eyes that look outward and inward, and that’s visible in her self-portraits, this almost-conflicted state of being that surfaces in her use of color and the emotions that her drawings and paintings evoke.” Themes from the writing appear in the art, but it’s also easy to glimpse elements of the art in the writing. As Moss puts it, “how the visual surfaces in her descriptions. She compares her daughter, Frieda, to a ‘fat gold watch’ when she’s born. You start realizing how much she must have been seeing in her mind before putting it into words.”

Triple-Face Portrait, Sylvia Plath c. 1950-1951, Tempera on paper Sheet

Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

Plath’s interest in her visual life went beyond some primordial notion of selfie culture. “I think she really cared about what her outward identity said to people around her,” Moss surmises. The poet cared about clothing—her fashion sketches appear frequently in her diaries—and about the nitty-gritty of aesthetics, down to her choice of stationary. “There was one letter she wrote to a boyfriend, Philip McCurdy, where she says she prefers gray paper with red letterhead, but she was writing on yellow to be fun.” (To see how closely Plath mined her journals and letters in her writing, consider this passage from The Bell Jar: “So I wrote Philomena Guinea a long letter in coal-black ink on gray paper with the name of the college embossed on it in red.”)

There’s an irony here: For someone so preoccupied with self-presentation, Plath’s image has always been controlled by others—first and foremost by her estranged husband, poet Ted Hughes, who burned his dead wife’s final journal, futzed with the manuscript of her masterpiece Ariel, and published a posthumous version of the book that was quite different (though possibly better) than what she left behind—and then by us, her fans, who saw in the poet only what we wanted to see.

Which is, in and of itself, a pretty good case for the National Portrait Gallery show. Here is Sylvia Plath, revealing herself as she wished to be seen, in all her complexity. “I wanted her light side to be balanced with her dark side,” says Moss. “What I was most concerned about was showing all sides of her.”