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Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning by Christina Britzolakis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. 250. $60.00, cloth.
Sylvia Plath wrote intensely and died immensely. Her poems constructed stunning psychological landscapes and exhibited a verbal complexity rare in twentieth-century poetry. In death she achieved an iconic status usually reserved for celebrity suicides, political assassinations, and royal car crashes. Her texts and her death helped to shape private and public mourning in her time, and they continue to do so today. Now Christina Britzolakis has written an important new book that attempts to make sense of textual patterns in Plath's writing while steering clear of the sensational life story. That her book is nonetheless drawn toward that story reveals not simply the continuing power of Plath as a cultural figure but also a crisis in critical theory as it attempts to separate its operations from those of its suppressed double, biography
Emphasizing the rhetoricity and self-reflexivity of Plath's writing, Britzolakis convincingly argues that the texts reflect a sophisticated awareness of audience, literary tradition, and the cultural authority of poetic discourse. These features, however, have not been as "neglected" as she suggests (5). Britzolakis does not actually blaze a trail here but proceeds down a path cut by numerous critics before her. Nevertheless, she does chart the territory in detailed and perceptive ways. She tells us at the outset that "the difficulty for Plath's critics is one of finding a critical language which does justice to her exploration of gender, subjectivity, and the unconscious, without reinscribing her within a poetics of unmediated expressivity" (6). That sentence vividly evokes the crisis in theory that animates this book. Old-fashioned expressivism could not admit the degree to which writing is artificial, whereas poststructuralism cannot find an adequate language in which to register the relations between writing and subject. How can the scholar inscribe a poetics of mediated expressivity without slighting either the mediation or the expressivity?
Britzolakis argues that Plath's "construction of the speaking subject displaces familiar distinctions between poet and persona" because the location of the textual "I" is "unstable and duplicitous" (6). She wishes to describe a Plath who, instead of expressing anguished authenticity, harnesses "the expressive conventions of the lyric cry for a language of elaborate inauthenticity"...