Sylvia Plath and racism

It took me a while to decide on the title of this piece. At first I was going to call it "The Dark Side of Sylvia Plath", but I then realised that a lot of Plath's work doesn't really have much of a light side to it.

Sylvia Plath is highly regarded by many, not only for her dark, introspective verse but also her caustic, observational prose, diverse life experience and razor-sharp mind. She attracts a great deal of posthumous sympathy for her maltreatment at the hands of her late husband, Ted Hughes, which many believe contributed to her untimely end. She has been heavily praised by the feminist movement for many decades, and cited on many shortlists of great feminist icons alongside the likes of Virginia Woolf. The most famous example of her female empowerment verse would probably be Lady Lazarus, ending with the immortal line, "out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air".

Her work has been greatly influential, not only on other poets but also, it seems, on some musicians.

Ryan Adams wrote a song about her and it is perhaps no coincidence that Annie Lennox released an album in 1995 entitled Medusa. Kate Bush also made her long-awaited comeback in 2005 with a concept album named Aerial (albeit with a different spelling to Plath's Ariel).

So it was exactly because of this high reputation - arguably well deserved - that I was shocked to discover just how racially dubious Plath's work could be.

Reading discussions on Plath and race issues, it's often her references to Jews and the Holocaust that get the most attention. The most famous example of this would probably be "Daddy" in which Plath presents a complex love/hate relationship between a father figure and herself, ultimately denouncing the father figure and presenting him as a Nazi. She then compares her plight at the hands of this man to that of Jewish Holocaust victims:


An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.


There are many other such references in her verse, including in the aforementioned Lady Lazarus where she uses the simile "bright as a Nazi lampshade" to describe her skin's magical renewal.

Many Plathian scholars also interpret The Thin People as referring to European Jews. If this is true, it is perhaps more worrying than the previous example as it presents the Jews - "so weedy a race" - as gaining power, and going from being victims to coming "later, into our bad dreams/their menace/not guns, not abuses/but a thin silence".

[It is also interesting to note that Adolf Hitler's propagandists characterised the disabled and other undesirables as emaciated "useless eaters", ripe for execution. Whether or not Plath was aware of this is unclear.]

From discussions on poetry newsgroups and elsewhere it seems some readers do see Plath's Holocaust references as crass - and indeed you could say that it is insensitive to use such horrific images of genocide to describe your own plight, especially if you're not Jewish.

But when I first read Daddy and Lady Lazarus I saw Plath - a young woman of German and Austrian background - trying to come to terms with the horrors of Nazism and identify closely with its victims.

"She wants to feel and think like a Jew", I thought. "She wants to get close to the victims of the worst kinds of suffering and empathise with them".

So I put the issues of taste aside. I could see that Plath had an interest in the darker side of life and all the flaws and foibles that come with being human - from our inescapable mortality to our messy bodily fluids.

I also noted the reference to African slaves in the third stanza of the Arrival of the Bee Box, symbolising the creatures she longed to set free, and I approved of its use. I interpreted it as Plath literally 'feeling' the plight of the oppressed- a very effective piece of imagery.

But then I made the mistake - if you can call it a mistake - of reading extracts from her dairies.

Published in 2000, the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath contained previously unseen material, charting Plath's life from age 11 till her suicide in 1963. The work is highly detailed and shows Plath's well-attuned eye for human observation.

Unfortunately, it also shows her use of blatant anti-Semitism.


“...the fat, gold-toothed, greasy-haired Jews sunning themselves, and oiling their plump, rutted flesh.” (Journals, July 1950-53, p.96)

“Slimy dark curly Jewish Americans saunter down, expensive tweed jackets” (Journals, July 1956- August 1956, p. 261)

“Rodman came in with Baskin: a surprise: no fat oily Jewish intellectual but a thin, wiry, tan fellow with dark, queerly vulnerable brown eyes, very lean, almost hollow chested” (Journals, 28 August 1957- 14 October 1958, p. 407)

“A weak kindly escort, Ed Cohn, too gentle, too sweet and soft” (Journals, 12 December 1958 – 15 November 1959 p.463

“Jews, coarse - tan- faced” (Journals, June 1957 – June 1960)

“...as the witchy Jewess in the green arsenic dressing-gown told me on my walk...” (Journals June 1956 – March 1961, p. 608)

In case you think I've taken these quotes out of context - they are printed verbatim, straight off the page. Plath used no inverted commas nor any perceivable irony to show she was being tongue-in-cheek. It doesn't take a linguist to see that the adjectives used to describe Jews here are entirely negative; even the one Jew she meets who she doesn't consider repulsive and disgusting is "weak", "too gentle" and "soft".

Other minority groups don't come in for much flak in Plath's Journals; black people are portrayed in a more or less neutral manner, and gay men are simply discussed in a shrugged-shoulders, non-committal way.

So what do we - poetry readers, fans of Sylvia Plath - conclude from this?

Racism in classic English literature and poetry is not uncommon: many are familiar with the stereotypes behind Shakespeare's Shylock, Dickens' Fagin and T.S Eliot's references to "red-eyed scavengers".

But the difference is that Sylvia Plath is consistently celebrated as a liberal heroine - the very antithesis of such 'sexist pigs' as John Buchan, Graham Greene or - ugh! - Ian Fleming.

And yet side by side, could you honestly tell the difference between the racist language of Plath and that of Buchan - or to take some more highbrow examples: Waugh, Greene or Trollope?

I don't think you could.

It shows us that we cannot get too sentimental about our favourite authors and poets. Can we ever separate the artist from their art, the poet from their poetry? Should we?

Perhaps that's a discussion for another day.

But I'm afraid my opinion of Sylvia Plath will now forever be coloured by those few coarse, slimy words.

Extracts from The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962, Faber and Faber, 2000

ISBN 0-571-19704-3