That being said, I do think it takes a gross amount of hubris to think that your personal agony is somehow commensurate with the genocide of millions of people. And as I’ve learned from other Jewish poets, such as Adrienne Rich and survivor Irena Klepfisz, there is strength in solidarity. As a proponent of intersectionality, I see power in letting the Holocaust stand for supremacist thinking beyond a particular time or place. It suggests that the Holocaust is inherently incomparable to other systems of extreme cruelty. It’s great that students want to align themselves with marginalized groups, but to say that Holocaust metaphors are automatically off-limits is, in my opinion, counterproductive. Instead, I want to consider what this generational shift in attention might indicate. The truth is that there is no one way to approach these things, and emotional responses to art are often just as valid as so-called logical ones. I’m not going to suggest an approach that we as readers/writers/ethical human beings “should” or “shouldn’t” take when it comes to adoring a writer’s work despite their problematic politics. If I had to characterize the attitude towards Plath among my peers, it was that, sure, The Bell Jar had its fair share of racism, like most fiction written by white people in the 1950s, and, sure, metaphors like skin as “bright as a Nazi lampshade” were uncomfortable, to say the least, but we were there to study literature, not the morality of the person behind it. There were more than a few times that Plath came up in class, but it was never in relation to her questionable Holocaust metaphors. Keep in mind that this was a decade ago and that, needless to say, I cannot speak to the experience of all Jews. I’m Jewish and I studied English and creative writing at a predominantly Jewish, albeit secular, college. Most of the complaints were aimed toward Plath’s use of Holocaust metaphors, most notably in her famed poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” Who was this non-Jewish writer, they asked, comparing her private suffering to the near-annihilation of an entire race of people? Who was she to describe her cold, unfeeling father as a Nazi? To make matters worse, this was the 1950s, when details of the Final Solution were only just being brought to light. Leila Einhorn at Sylvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’s house in LondonĪ fellow MFA candidate teaching a class on modern female writers described to me the indignation with which many of her undergraduate students approached Plath’s work. ![]() While it’s clear that Plath’s influence within modern American literature is not going anywhere soon, a recent conversation with a friend has me questioning not just the tenor of that legacy but also my own relationship to this literary icon. ![]() Most recently, a new volume of the writer’s correspondence has revealed the extent of the physical and emotional abuse she suffered under the hands of her husband, the venerated poet Ted Hughes. ![]() Today, Plath continues to fascinate the literary imagination not only for her creative work but also the tortured life that inspired it. For now, I had Plath, a writer who spoke with candor about issues like the patriarchy and mental illness, issues that I had long been too ashamed to think about or had been told weren’t “real.” That would come later, with college and gender studies classes and years of activism. I was a teenage girl, aware of my growing frustration with the world that I’d inherited, yet with no vocabulary to articulate these feelings. Discovering Plath’s poetry among the overwhelmingly male voices of the American literary canon was like finding my way home. Like many female-identifying poets, I grew up with what can only be called a kind of worship for Sylvia Plath. By Colorado Review Editorial Assistant Leila Einhorn
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