Loving Sylvia Plath: A Conversation with Emily Van Duyne

By Ash Trebisacci on July 19, 2024

You could say I was drawn to Emily Van Duyne for some of the same reasons I was drawn to Sylvia Plath: she is bold and expressive, brilliant and unafraid to speak the truth. During the pandemic, Emily, a writer and professor at Stockton University, hosted open virtual classes on Plath and her mythology, regaling reader-fans with insights from the archives and fresh readings of this writer who many know as the cheated-on wife of poet Ted Hughes, who subsequently died by suicide at age thirty.

Emily's book, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, is a work of scholarship and reflection that examines Plath's poetry and life to show us where we've gone wrong in understanding both. Van Duyne approaches her material with an interdisciplinary feminist lens to reveal where we've failed to take Plath at her word about her husband's abuse, set the record straight, and restore the poet to her full humanity.

We spoke on Zoom about this "disquieting debut" (Publishers Weekly).

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Ash Trebisacci

How did you decide where to start with a subject as big as Plath?

Emily Van Duyne

I knew I wanted to write a book that was partly about how her mythology had been constructed, and how her life did not reflect the mythology. One argument I wanted to make is that a lot of the critics who established the mythology surrounding Plath wrote about her as though from a great critical distance, when in fact they knew her really well. Many of them had been in love with her and had dated her, had slept with her. My feeling is that there was a lot of animosity informing that work based on their personal experiences.

I really wanted the book to be an argument that Plath was a survivor of intimate partner violence and sexual assault, both in her marriage and outside of her marriage, and that that is one of the key subjects of Ariel and The Bell Jar. . . . But I also believe that the poems she had written in the late summer and fall of 1962—not all of them, but many of them—were a cry for freedom, for liberation. Because she died, they don't get read that way.

[Author and sexual violence survivor] Chanel Miller had given a talk at Stockton and said that in investigations about sexual assault, emotions are disregarded, but emotions carry a lot of information. I wanted that to be in the introduction . . . because, when I looked back on all the time I had spent with Plath's work, I knew (and a lot of people knew) that he [Plath's husband, Ted Hughes] had been violent with her, had treated her terribly, and that she'd been really afraid of him, but there's nothing much about that in print. So why did I feel that way? That emotion carries around a lot of information, but I had to figure out what the information was.

I always felt like I was being lied to about [Plath]. You're a huge Plath fan; did you have that experience?

Ash Trebisacci

Yeah. It's interesting because I started with the unabridged diaries, so I felt like that was the truth of [Plath], and I knew her very well. Then, as I started to read more scholarship, I thought: this sounds like a bunch of white men writing about someone that they couldn't have truly known, and didn't fully know, and don't want me to fully know.

Emily Van Duyne

I believe that Plath was a victim of control in her life, and the force of control extended beyond her lifetime—it extended to her readers, to different scholars, [and] to her friends and family, who wanted to try to get a different story of her into the world.

You're told: "Don't love her; she's crazy; she's dangerous; she'll be bad for you," [but] I have reaped nothing but joy from my experience learning about Plath, reading Plath, and seeking out more about her.

Ash Trebisacci

On page 5 you write: "Outing yourself as a voracious and loving reader of Sylvia Plath means joining a long discourse that sees you as a frivolous and unstable consumer of serious poetry. . . ." Talk to me about the phrase "outing yourself" . . . I do feel like it's easier to out myself as a queer and trans person sometimes than it is to out myself as a Plath fan/lover. Why?

Emily Van Duyne

I think that points to the fact that there's so much work left to do on Plath that, for other writers of that generation, we've been doing forever. Where's the work on queering Plath? Where's the work on queering Hughes? Where's the work on Plath as an anti-Black racist? . . . Where's the decolonized Plath? and on and on. The reason that those things don't really exist yet, though they're starting to creep into the discourse, has to do with [wanting] to keep Plath in a locked box.

There's a really good argument to be made for Plath's queerness, but if you're not even able to say out loud, "I love Plath's work, and in fact I think she was, if not the best, then one of the ten best poets of the 20th century," then you're sure not going to be able to say, "and by the way, I think she might have been kind of gay!"

It's not just that Hughes had individual power, although he did. He was part of this larger network of power, and the people in that network are symbolic of larger systems of power. It's really hard to come up against them, to push back against them. What do you think?

Ash Trebisacci

It's the legacy of the "silence of the archives" and the fear of retribution. I have no reason to be afraid . . . and yet, I do fear people losing respect for my conversations, my work, my scholarship. It's weird that it still looms so large, but then you read [Loving Sylvia Plath] and you see: This is exactly why. Here are the systems, and the steps everyone took to make sure that we could access some information and could not access the rest of it.

Emily Van Duyne

I ended up cutting this from the book, but I still think it's valid: Robert Lowell's foreword to the American edition of Ariel did so much damage. Because so many people read that, and read [a few of Plath's] poems, and then didn't read anything else. . . . In that, he essentially says: "there's no doubt she's a great writer, but the writing killed her." To me, that serves as this warning shot to women, and non-white, and queer people . . . "Don't come for these systems in the way that she did, because if you do, it can kill you." And I still believe that. I know it to be true; I lived it. I should have published this 15 years ago, but I was scared.

I think [Loving Sylvia Plath] is academic; it's intellectually rigorous—but at the same time, it's not considered . . . rigorous, to say: I lived through a version of this myself, and that has allowed me to better understand. What academia tells us to say [is]: I lived through a version of this myself, so I can't write about that, because I don't have objectivity. Whereas for me, this was my life. . . . [The book] became like an avatar for me. I was like: I'm going to prove this happened to her, and when I do, you'll know for sure that it happened to me.

Ash Trebisacci

This is so indicative of western understandings of academia and knowledge production too . . . that lived experience does not add to your insights; it's at odds with them.

Emily Van Duyne

That's what people like [British philosopher] Miranda Fricker are working so hard against. They're saying: "No, because we've said that for so long, we have no understanding of people's lived experiences who have survived long-term domestic violence or sexual assault."

Ash Trebisacci

I also want to discuss your most recent Substack essay, "Against Hagiography." There's a section that resonated with my experience of reading your book, when you write that some of Plath's poems were "intellectual exercises, poker chips I could stack in the bet I was waging in my petty academic world, that everyone else was wrong about Sylvia Plath, and I was right. This was, in the end, just another version of what Hughes did to Plath: another stupid, losing contest, ruled not by love, but vanity, and fear. Ownership. Control."

Honestly, every note I wrote in the margin is "Go Emily! Tear them apart! Take them down!" which is probably not the best way to respond to this work about violence (to incite more metaphorical violence). Can you talk about how you check yourself when you're feeling compelled by your rage?

Emily Van Duyne

I [actually] had a chapter in the first draft called "Sympathy for Ted Hughes." . . . It was about Hughes' editing of the journals and my own experience in one of the worst times of my life. . . . When I was with [my abusive ex], I lived perpetually in the future, and [I thought that] in the future, I would forget. There's a line that Hughes put in his foreword to the 1982 edition of Plath's journals . . . where he admits that he lost and burned two of her journals. He says in a parenthetical statement: "(in those days I considered forgetfulness to be an essential part of survival.)"

I do understand how he feels. . . . But at the same time, when you read about Hughes . . . the thing that you come away with is that he's like Sisyphus; he just never learns. He keeps making the same egregious, violent mistakes, and women keep dying around him. I do have sympathy for him, because there was a point in my life where I wasn't going to reckon with any of the mistakes I had made. I was just going to wait it out and I was going to forget and everything was going to be fine; we were going to have a normal life and . . . we weren't. I had to rebuild my whole life and I had to get away and I had to raise my son and I had to raise myself. I had to become a whole person. So I remember frequently, when I have all this rage, that there was a time when I was a very different person and I did really stupid things. . . . The difference is when that person is using fear and violence to control you.

Ash Trebisacci

This question is a favorite of mine, and it's about one of our other mutual obsessions, the podcast You're Wrong About. The host, Sarah Marshall, once said that writing a book was "like doing a You're Wrong About yourself." This book is basically a You're Wrong About Sylvia Plath, but also a You're Wrong About her fans . . . and more? What is one thing you discovered you were wrong about in the process of writing this?

Emily Van Duyne

I always would say [before I wrote Loving Sylvia Plath] that Plath was really funny, but I don't think that I really got the levels of her humor in her poems, in her letters, in her diary, until I wrote this book. . . . She's so real and she's so funny and brilliant, just this flash of energy and electricity and magic . . . and I just love her so much. I love her so much.