Read Online Sylvia Plath: A Biography by Linda Wagner-Martin - Free Book Online

another issue that worried Plath as she was growing up. Her reputation at Bradford was that of a good girl, one who had not had sex. But she had done her share of necking and petting. The midcentury code of morality was entirely negative — nice girls didn’t have sex. It was a delicate balance, for a girl to appear “normal” — i.e. sensual — and yet remain a virgin. According to the magazines, women were supposed to enjoy sex, but with just one lifetime partner. Doris Day’s naive allure became the ideal, just as Farnham and Lundberg’s Modern Woman : The Lost Sex became the 1950s guide to satisfying relationships. Thoroughly Freudian, Modern Woman stated that women would find sexual satisfaction only through motherhood. It was a commonly held opinion, And during the Fifties the birth rate rose with such speed — the peak of the “Baby Boom” — that the nation’s population grew more than 18% in that decade.
    Sylvia had grown up with these attitudes and with the embodiment of them all — The Ladies’ Home Journal . When she came home from school, she devoured that magazine. Several years later, when she lived in England, she frequently asked Aurelia to send her back copies. As her unpublished short fiction shows clearly, she often wrote stories aimed at that market (Ted Hughes recalls that she wrote for either The New Yorker or Ladies’ Home Journal , “the two alternating according to her mood”). Somehow, the latter magazine epitomized the American woman’s ideal life, and Sylvia was never certain that she did not want to live that life. Her early conditioning to live exactly as her mother directed and to please her parents in order to win their love was almost impossible to shake.
    Her high school fiction reflects the pressure she felt from those cultural ideals. Much of her writing is concerned with women’s lives and the choices women make. Even at fifteen and sixteen Sylvia saw herself as outside the mainstream of society, and she worried about being out there. Whether she felt guilty (why did she want to be different from other women? from her mother?) or rebellious, she hid her feelings except in her writing. Throughout her life, Sylvia’s writing expressed feelings she did not allow herself to admit otherwise.
    In “The Dark River,” a 1949 story, the striking older woman protagonist tells the young female listener of having given up the man who loved her so that she could lead her own life. Her final parting from him is defiant, described by Plath as a triumph:
    It was good to run. As her feet thudded over the gravel path, the blood pounded in her ears and drowned out the sound of the river, which still echoed in her brain. Something pent up inside her broke, free and wild. Her hair flew out behind her as she ran....
    Generally, Plath’s stories from this period depict a girl or woman protagonist desperate for a lover, yet here a broken romance is the climactic event. Young as she was, Sylvia was exploring women’s lives in considerable dimension.
    Much of her early fiction concerns the conflict between some “ideal” woman — virginal or married, a good daughter or wife and the slightly suspect “career woman.” The continuing character in Sylvia’s stories is the girl who must choose between roles, sometimes an overachiever and usually alienated from life around her. Other poems and stories reflect her growing suspicion of her family’s values, her mistrust of her mother’s advice. Much of her writing is already complex and ambivalent. The story “East Wind,” for example, presents Miss Minton, a single woman who is lured through city streets by an elfin child, almost to her death. Here the water imagery that Sylvia often used to depict security becomes the place of suicide. Ostensibly, Miss Minton is chasing her hat in the strong wind of the title, but the chase brings her to a river bridge:
    She reached out over the railing, and there was the water down below. Way, way down