Shakespeare’s Sister

Day 19 – A song from your favourite album.

Amendment: This isn’t my favourite album, it’s just a really good one. And also, it’s not the original album this song was on. That was “The World Won’t Listen” and “Louder than Bombs”. The album I have is entitled “The Sounds of The Smiths” and has about 40 of their best songs. I really can’t pick a favourite Smith’s song, but I like this because the title refer’s to an essay in Virginia Woolf’s feminist exposition  ’A room of one’s own’. Woolf invents the character ‘Judith Shakespeare’, William Shakespeare’s sister, who is denied access to an education which her brother is given. Woolf argues that  as a female she would not have had the opportunity to become the most famous playwright in the world since she would have been denied the eduaction and access to do so. This suggests not only the obvious, that women have been denied opportunity based on gender, but that the talents of women have lain dormant for all of history. The term ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ has been adopted in popular culture, from the band who also takes its name from Woolf’s character, to the feminist blog that expounds on the position of women today. 

The Smiths were introduced to me by Stu, who, incredulous at a person never having heard of his most loved and admired band, quickly rectified this mistake. I’m glad he did, despite commenting at the time that the band were just ‘a bunch of whiners’. Whining can be good. It can be clever, melancholic, narcissistic, thought-provoking, negative and enlightening all at the same time. Which is in essence what I find The Smiths to be.

The collected suicidal writers (part 1)

There’s nothing quite like the satisfying feeling of cleaning out a wardrobe, cabinet or bookshelf. After purging your life of extraneous and unwanted clutter some sort of internal cleansing seems to have taken place, only what really matters is left and you have extra space to revel in before you inevitably fill it with more clutter. What’s even better though is watching a friend or relative rid themselves of unwanted goods and being first in line to pick through the op-shop pile. Yes, this has happened to me a number of times, the most fulfilling usually occurs when Katie attempts to rid her overflowing clothes drawers of some excellent ‘last-season’ goodies. But actually what I inherited from my sister’s bookshelf last week was two poetry volumes ‘The collected poems of Emily Dickinson’ and ‘Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems’; remnants from year twelve literature.

 ’Do I really want to keep these?’ Annie asked. Then, answering her own question ‘No. Emily Dickinson was a psychopathic maniac. When am I ever going to read her poems again?’

‘I’ll take them!’ I immediately volunteered. ‘I’m partial to the psychopathic maniac female writer.’

‘Really?’ She looked surprised as I snatched them greedily. It was my first open confession of a growing morbid fascination; I had already written a research paper on Virginia Woolf and just last week finished Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar.

People sometimes describe a great novel using words like ‘gripping’ or ‘thrilling’, an experience where words ‘jump off the page’. I have to concur with some of these clichés; there were sentences in The Bell Jar that did stand out in bold for their blunt, unashamed honesty. And what struck me was reading a chapter and feeling as though the words in print were exactly what would have poured out of my own mouth at some points in my life had I had the ability to articulate them. Especially the parts about sex: ‘when i was nineteen, pureness was a great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line. I thought it would be the way I’d feel if I ever visited Europe.’

The Bell Jar is an internal monologue of a year in the life of Esther Greenwood; an intelligent scholarship student who goes from a promising honours candidate to a suicidal patient in a mental institution receiving shock treatments to try and cure her depression. Throughout the second half of the book, Esther contemplates and makes various attempts at suicide by drowning, hanging, cutting her wrists, jumping from a bridge and so on; ‘I could see that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage without any sense at all.’ Esther doesn’t succeed in her mission during the course of the novel; the last page sees her stepping into the office of her rehab clinic where a panel of doctors will determine whether she is well enough to go back to college. What is most chilling about The Bell Jar though is that Sylvia Plath’s own suicide followed only a month after the first publication, printed under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas. The book is thus branded a roman a clef, a partial autobiography, making the thoughts of Esther Greenwood frighteningly real, a mirror of it’s authors own experience. More horrifying still though is a memoir written by one of Plath’s first publishers, which convincingly claims that Sylvia Plath never intended to kill herself but rather ‘to be found and saved’ and she died ‘only because of a freakish series of accidents’.  :O

I wonder if my interest in suicidal manic-depressive feminist writers should alarm me a little. Nah. I could hazard a guess that in the last forty years millions of literature essays, poetry analysis and feminist papers have been submitted on the life and work of Sylvia Plath.

Now I have to admit that I have done little more than flick though the collected works of poetry yet; but they are safe and sound in my almost entirely narrative-based bookshelf. Makes me feel just a little bit smarter having them there in between Maggie Alderson and Meg Cabot.