Sylvia Plath's baggage

Plath at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. 1952/1953.

Among the many recent biographies, Pain, Parties, Work, by Elizabeth Winder, tries a new angle. It unpacks—sometimes by opening the suitcases and listing Plath’s outfits—the 1953 summer that Plath, then twenty-one and still an undergraduate at Smith College, spent in New York City as a Mademoiselle guest editor. Winder is eager to debunk certain preconceptions about Plath, arguing that she was

fully immersed in the material culture of her time…. The bras, lipsticks, and kilts included in the book are vital (Plath’s favorite word) to understanding Sylvia as both participant and product of midcentury America.

Drawing on her reporting, from Plath’s journals and letters, and of course from Plath’s own fictional account of that summer in The Bell Jar, Winder does an excellent job recreating the story—up to a point. That point is where Plath parted company with the world of 1950s material girls and almost-all-the-way sexual encounters, the world of hats and gloves, the world of ambitious fresh-scrubbed co-eds selling their intellects for a pittance. Following the Rosenberg executions (which Plath was horrified by, and took personally), and sexual bullying from powerful men and social bullying from powerful women, Plath cracked. She did not just get depressed. She got enraged—and whether one is reading Winder or The Bell Jar, it is clear that a large aspect of her rage was aimed directly at the world she had signed on for as a Mademoiselle girl. This girl—who, along with her mother, had slaved to save for, and sew, her summer working wardrobe as though it were a bridal trousseau—as a last act before leaving New York City, threw all of her clothes off the roof of the Barbizon Hotel. Yes, it was a kind of “suicide”; but it was also a homicide, the murder of the image, and the materials, of what she had valued.