Sylvia Plath’s grave in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

My grandmother Jean graduated from Smith College in 1947 with a liberal arts degree that she never once used. After moving into the Barbizon Hotel for Women in New York that summer, she almost immediately discovered she was pregnant and had little choice but to marry my grandfather, a very amusing but often cruel man who drank heavily and made a career out of running soft cons. Today I looked up a picture of the shabby postwar ranch they raised their four children in and remembered how my grandfather had once installed a decommissioned toilet on the front lawn, filling it with pansies and marigolds and then laughing as though the joke could possibly be on anyone but himself. Jean, stoic from exhaustion, had learned to ignore these petty humiliations; she’d accepted that whatever she’d once expected for herself was a dream from another life.

Her timelines and chronologies began to drift when she exhibited the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease in her early 80s, and though she retained much of her glamour and a measure of her clarity, the facts of her life and her fantasies of what could have been eventually slipped across one another so that the distance between who she’d once wanted to be and who she actually was edged incrementally toward a place where disappointment and wish fulfillment are allowed to coalesce. I remember asking her once if she’d known Sylvia Plath at school, if they’d had mutual friends or if she’d ever heard any real-time rumors about her famous classmate’s triumphs or her troubles. “Yes, I knew her. She was difficult and lonely,” my grandmother said. “Talented and ambitious and miserable.” It wasn’t until much later that I realized that my math had been wrong, that it was impossible that they’d ever had a single interaction, either mediated or otherwise; Plath hadn’t enrolled in Smith until 1951, by which time my grandmother was living in the ranch house, a second baby already growing inside her.

Though Jean’s belief that she understood Plath as a person was a mistake of cognition, there are a lot of people who consciously choose to believe the same thing, as though overidentification with a stranger might endow one with some special kind of psychic intimacy. Now dead for almost three times longer than she was alive, the poet has become a site of conflict where we can collectively wage a series of ideological battles over meaning and value and pain, where we can argue over what women hide and what men steal, over the difference between neglect and abuse, protection and erasure. The disturbances that have accumulated around Plath have led me to think of her as a suffocated person, a figure laden to the point of collapse with a series of artistic, personal, and symbolic expectations too contentious to ever yield satisfaction. Jealously protected by the various factions and fans who demand spiritual proximity to both her ghost and her work, the writer has been relocated by time to the realm of abstraction, a place where a culmination of jumbled up fantasies seem to exist, and one where we find pleasure in demanding justice for a person who never asked for our opinion in the first place. It seems to me that the more we insist that we can know the poet, the less air we allow her to retain.

My favorite photograph of Plath is from 1954, taken six months after the long stay at McLean Hospital she later dramatized in The Bell Jar. As is typical of most images taken of her during this time – a period she referred to as her Platinum Summer – the writer is pictured with bleached hair and tanned skin, her mouth and nails painted red so that they appear to match the flower she’s haphazardly stuck in the white-hot flash of a bikini top. She looks happy, as though in this moment she doesn’t need to ruminate over her troubles, as though she doesn’t need to wonder what it feels like to be liberated from marital failure or precocious ambition or the moral bondage of filial duty. In this picture, she’s holding onto a dandelion and smiling, seeming to gather up her breath so that she might blow apart the frothy parachute and pay witness to its thousand shooting stars as they scatter before her. It’s a lovely moment, but part of me thinks she’s just pretending, posing for the picture, imagining what it’s like to expend an exhalation purely for the pleasure of the act. If this pantomime of breathing is the perfect accessory for her carefree American girl disguise, I also think it’s her most honest lie; there’s nothing to lose but your sadness if you can slip across the divide and trade places with your luminescent doppelgänger.

Other images of Plath from this time likewise document the weeks or months she spent trying to become her own photographic negative, all of her dark edges bleached by an artificial sunlight that couldn’t quite manage to banish the creeping threat of a barometric drop. Even her earliest work gestures toward the idea of the double (her senior thesis at Smith was titled “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels”), a detail that seems particularly premonitory in the face of the opposing perspectives that have eventually come to haunt her legacy. Photographs from this summer of ’54 are often invoked by those who want to distance the poet from cultural mythologies that situate her directly at the center of postwar female misery. The photos mostly depict her sunbathing at the Massachusetts beach where she spent her childhood prior to the 1940 death of her father, her first and perhaps most fatal wound. “Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it,” she wrote in her journal that summer. “It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again.”

Plath toyed more than once with the concept of masking, both with the idea that the double is just another costume one can deploy at will, and with her frequent implications that identity is a carceral state, that we are locked into playing roles we don’t want through the very nature of our existence. If the psychological divide evident in the emotional differences between her letters home and her journals serves as an indicator of her proclivity for splitting, her poetry concretizes the conflict she experienced, the acreage of distance between feeling and being. “I shall never get out of this,” she wrote in the opening lines of “In Plaster” (1961). “There are two of me now.”

Maybe it’s the chronic sense of claustrophobia that always seemed to circulate around her that led Plath to so often invoke breathing in her writing. There are deep breaths, sour breaths, moth breaths. There are the breaths Esther Greenwood battles for under the isolating dome of the bell jar, the Alpine breaths Buddy Willard takes at a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Catskills, the breathy girlishness of Doreen in her white dress, her breasts tumbling perilously over the edge of a sweetheart neckline in the middle of a New York heatwave. In Plath’s world, there is breath for everyone and everything; her betrayals breathe, her flowers breathe, her radiators and her oceans too, each one of them battling against a quiet but interminable urge to see what would happen if one simply decided to stop.

Much speculation has been made regarding Plath’s final years with Ted Hughes, and there have been volumes of literature devoted to untangling both the details of her unhappiness and the degree to which he was responsible for it. Hughes’s early refusal to discuss Plath’s death, his destruction of her final diaries, his need to control her biographers, and his insistence upon the series of strange redactions that run throughout her published journals and correspondences have not only exacerbated the public’s suspicion that his shame over a highly publicized series of infidelities turned him revisionist, but have amplified the doubled nature of an identity already confused by its own refraction. If it feels like violence, that’s because it is. But just as violent is our desire to wrench out “the truth,” to determine which version of the poet is authentic, which version is the lie. It’s an impulse that I too am guilty of; sometimes my search for Sylvia feels like I am committing an act of forever-failing resuscitation, as though I am forcing air into a person unable to express to me that she’s simply had enough.

In her writing on Plath, Janet Malcolm addresses how we have culturally succumbed to an impulse that reduces the dead poet to the realm of the symbolic, how we now feel free to ransack her journals and private letters because we’ve turned her from a person into a container. In 2025, Plath is just as much a place where we can collectively regard a series of ideological conflicts about art and cruelty and erasure as she is an artist. Reading Malcolm’s words, I was reminded of what it means to reconstruct a life through the lens of violation – we simply believe that we understand Plath, and our fondness for looking at her as a site of self-location fortifies our certainty that we deserve to know more. I’ve been thinking a lot about how visitors to her gravestone continue to delete the Hughes that hangs off the end of her name, as though an act of redaction can somehow be restorative, as though one might possibly court favor with a ghost. Is it vandalism or justice? An offering or a theft? It depends on who you ask. I wonder if the air smells like the ocean where she is.

I was surprised to learn during the course of my research that we can identify exactly when Plath stopped writing the poems for Ariel, the posthumously published and critically lauded collection she penned in a five-month fever during the long English winter of 1963. Dated February 5, just eight days prior to her death at the age of 30, Plath’s last two poems do not explicitly address their own order, but that cannot stop us from guessing. I was surprised to learn that one of these final poems is about balloons, which seem to be a symbol of both life and death, a container that celebrates the very essence of just being until it withers away. I have thought a lot about what this means and about how it figures into her final decisions; I’ve thought a lot about the moment she sealed the doors of her children’s rooms shut, turned on her oven, and breathed herself out of the world. It’s a beautiful poem, even if it gestures toward the terrible way she said goodbye.

“After we are dead,” Malcolm writes, “the pretense that we might be protected against the world’s careless malice is abandoned.” It’s a beautiful sentence because it’s true, because it manages to reach into the depths of us and produce something we don’t like to admit about value and robbery. A long time ago, I asked my son what he thought happened to people when they die. “They turn into tombstones,” he said, which I felt had a certain childish wisdom to it. I liked the idea that we can cast off our bodies and become monuments to ourselves, the etched rock a souvenir that marks the place where our agency has leached back into the earth, where our rights and dignity have dissolved into the dark comfort of some sort of primordial sludge. At my grandmother’s funeral, an old classmate of hers from Smith remarked that Jean’s ambition had been to pursue a career international banking, a detail that I had never heard before. I imagined her summer at the Barbizon, how those two months of freedom must have seemed like the beginning of forever to a girl from Pennsylvania who had both movie-star beauty and a college education in a time when only the luckiest and most privileged had both. I thought about what it means to look at the past and think you know someone, about what it means to admit that maybe you never knew them at all.

Alissa Bennett is a writer and has been a director at Gladstone Gallery since 2018. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New York Times, Ursula, and Vogue. Bennett is currently completing a script about the life of Edith Wharton. She teaches at the Yale School of Art and at Sarah Lawrence College.

Image credit: Public domain