5 - Gender and Society in Plath's Short Stories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
In a series of notes for a story she planed to call ‘Coincidentally Yours’, which would later become ‘The Smoky Blue Piano’, Plath wrote that it would be told from the perspective of a young woman who is essentially her. She listed a series of characteristics that this heroine and narrator would have – cheerful, fun- loving, popular, pretty but not conventionally so – and noted that it was herself on whom this character is based. These notes were written in the Fall semester or Christmas vacation of 1954. As Plath's fiction developed, she created narrators and protagonists who are not recognisably versions of herself, as in ‘The Invisible Man’ and her later women's magazine fiction. Nevertheless, the majority of Plath's stories are based on experiences and events in her own life. Fiction is, for Plath, above all a medium in which women's lives can be portrayed. In this chapter, I discuss the range of ways in which she does so.
Plath's Women's Magazine Fiction
Plath was an avid reader of women's magazines throughout her life. From Britain, she asked her mother to send her a feature from the Ladies' Home Journal about small children. When Plath was ill with a cold, Aurelia sent her a Ladies' Home Journal, and Plath replied that she had loved the entire magazine (LH 370). In 1961, she described herself as ‘homesick’ for the journal (LH 433).
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- Information
- Sylvia Plath's FictionA Critical Study, pp. 152 - 175Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010