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understanding of the value in Plath's contribution to either literature or human existence. One of the most basic of the impediments to understanding Plath's work through her non-literary writing (for instance), or through the reminiscences of friends and acquaintances, is the undeniable bias of human sentiments rising up through the presentations of her personal history. While her friends may wish to present objective information, there is no doubt aspects will be heightened or suppressed, whether through conscious or unconscious rewriting of the actual history. And no biographer will ever be able to surmount the difficulties presented by her mother's censorship (as illustrated in Letters Home (3) or the burning of her journals for 1962-63 by her estranged husband, the British poet, Ted Hughes. (4) In light of these direct influences on her story, must we not discontinue the examination of her life in the pretext of examining her art? In one study, Lynda Bundtzen attempted to wade through the bog of criticism, examining both feminist and misogynist-reactionary critiques, in the interest of developing a fair assessment of Plath's art. Yet the claims published in the early to mid-1970s were still strong when, in her 1983 publication called Plath's Incarnations, Bundtzen submitted to Irving Howe's dismissive view that no admirer of Plath has "offered a coherent statement as to the nature, let alone the value, of her vision." (5) This followed her reiteration of Howe's startling claim that: "Plath’s attempts to widen the scope of her concerns from personal anguish to the suffering of the Jews in the Nazi holocaust, are self-serving and poetically illegitimate." (6) However, it has long been a feature of the published 'authority' on the work of Plath that the nature of its inherent bias excludes consideration of either 'unofficial' theses presented to the international poetic consciousness in the form of elegies or the broader assimilation of her poetic developments, in pieces published by other authors since her death. What does it mean, after all, to say that her attempts to widen the scope of her concerns in Daddy are self-serving? While Howe argues it is not true that Plath was "a bit of a Jew" (Daddy), he has failed to allow for the differences between biographical truth and poetic truth. The fact of the matter is that Sylvia Plath was of Austrian and Polish descent, but she possessed very strong feelings about the Nazi atrocities. Is it not the narrator of the poem, rather than Plath, who aligns herself with the suppression and injury inflicted upon the Jewish people during WW II ? In making a parallel between her narrator and the "Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belson …” (Daddy). can we assert that Plath is not using a "willed hysteric tone” (7), but rather, is acknowledging the scope of "wars, wars, wars" (Daddy) that develop out of patriarchal and acquisitive societies through their refusal to acknowledge the |
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