'Provides a compelling argument for Plath's revision of the painful
parts of her life--the failed marriage, her anxiety for success,
and her ambivalence towards her mother. . . . The reader will feel
the tension in the poetry and the life.'
Choice '[Examines]
Plath's twin goals of becoming a famous poet and a perfect mother.
. . . This book's main points are clearly and forcefully argued:
that both poems and babies require 'struggle, pain, endless labor,
and . . . fears of monstrous offspring' and that, in the end, Plath
ran out of the resources necessary to produce both. Often maligned
as a self-indulgent confessional poet, Plath is here retrieved as a
passionate theorist.'--
Library Journal Susan Van Dyne's
reading of twenty-five of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems considers
three contexts: Plath's journal entries from 1957 to 1959
(especially as they reveal her conflicts over what it meant to be a
middle-class wife and mother and an aspiring writer in 1950s
America); the interpretive strategies of feminist theory; and
Plath's multiple revisions of the poems.