We Must Be Willing To Hold All Of This In Our Heads At Once

By Author: Alex Lee
Total Articles: 365
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Sally Bayley looks at Plath's engagement with a different kind of male dominance, and in doing so takes seriously aspects of Plath's work and thought that some critics have not wanted to see. Bayley addresses Plath's 'lifelong interest in feminine fashion as a form of theatre'. She offers a persuasive reading of the 'pencil sketches of forties starlets' that Plath doodles in her high school history notes as disruptions of 'the more "serious" diachronic narrative of male history'. Plath's 'fantasy females' undermine 'the rhetoric of high-minded nationalism and imperialism that permeates this Merrell Shoe decidedly male model of pedagogy and historical emphasis'.

Bayley elucidates the influence of Disney and his 'saccharine commercial and emotional palette' on Plath's early paintings of fairy tale princesses. Her reading of Plath's painting of Snow White suggests that even at a young age Plath was engaging in cultural resistance while at first glance appearing complicit: 'The composition suggests a young girl penned in by the limits of fairy-tale convention... the narrow horizon ...
... of her fairy-tale desire'. Other essays in Eye Rhymes elaborate on different aspects Plath's cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical engagement with the key questions of the period in which she lived. Christina Britzolakis shows how 'De Chirico's poetics of ruins and fragments' elicited Plath's reflection 'upon her relationship to a modernism in the process of being institutionalised'. Fan Jinghua offers an account of the development of Plath's visual poetics and its relationship to her writing. Speaking of Plath's last poems, Susan Gubar emphasises that their 'groundwork' was in the visual art Plath 'produced in her teenage years'. Gubar links Plath with other 'twentieth-century women artists who used visual and verbal forms to elaborate upon Merrell Boot femininity.

Eye Rhymes reveal the extent to which Plath was oppressed by yet wedded to U.S. consumerism. Bayley and Connors give us the key components of Plath's visual and textual language, and something entirely new: a portrait of Sylvia Plath that might be described as an aesthetic or politics of normality. Together, these essays and images insert Plath into a world that expands from a school girl's bedroom doodles to the war field to the Cambridge literary scene to Nazi Germany before re-inhabiting the domesticity of a woman's living room. To glimpse Plath at all, we must be willing to hold all of this in our heads at once, as she did.