![]() At the very least, this humanizing biography will discourage grisly Sylvia Plath jokes. ![]() She also liberates the supporting cast of Plath’s life from the damning and one-dimensional roles they often occupy as part of the death-myth of Plath’s life. While changing the popular perception of Sylvia Plath will take time, this book is a vital first step. In the massive effort that is Red Comet, Clark admirably identifies and resists the morbid tendency to look at every moment, every work, as a signpost on the way to Plath’s tragic suicide. ![]() ![]() As Clark shows, Plath’s life does not fit neatly into anti-Hughes, second-wave ideas about the poet, nor the lurid portrayal of a red-lipsticked blonde who maniacally pursued A’s and fame. The result of Clark’s admirable efforts is a nuanced and compelling 937 pages (plus 200 some pages of backmatter notes) that demonstrate how Plath has been unfairly reduced. Comparing “Daddy” to “The Waste Land” and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Clark writes that Plath’s ambitious late poems voice “horror at how an entire male humanist tradition, epitomized by her German professor father, has failed.” In reading Plath’s “Daddy” and other poems of this period, Clark demonstrates how these works are neither a mere tantrum against her family nor a “game of one-upsmanship” with her unfaithful partner. ![]() The benefit of Clark’s restraint is especially evident in her analysis of the break-up of the Hughes-Plath marriage. ![]()
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