A Writer's Ruminations

"Perhaps the link to pursue, then, is not the one between passion and truth, but between truth and death. Between being so knowing, and touching on the one thing that – as the cliché puts it – no one can ever know. Something untellable, but which has to be told, enters the frame when the subject of biography dies by her own hand, when death arrives too soon. And if that subject is a woman, there is always the risk that femininity will take on a deadly hue. In Freud’s reading, Cordelia – the ‘most excellent’ of the three sisters – becomes, in her dying moments, the ‘Goddess of Death’. In Lear’s arms, she is in fact carrying him, bringing him to the point where he will ‘make friends with the necessity of dying’. A woman is never more deadly than when so perfect, so innocent – like Cordelia – of any crime. Once the link is made, it is a no-win situation for the woman. Plath’s story offers us the same combination of elements, but more nakedly. Let the dead woman carry the can. What, it seems fair to ask, is being exorcised in the seemingly endless, punishing scrutiny of Sylvia Plath?"

— from Jacqueline Rose’s “This is not a biography”, a defense of psychoanalytic readings of Sylvia Plath’s work (via confusionis)