Prospero | Sylvia Plath's drawings

An unbearable lightness

An unprecedented exhibition of Plath's quaint sketches

By B.K. | LONDON

IN 1956, at the age of 23, Sylvia Plath met and married Ted Hughes, an English poet. While they honeymooned in Paris and Spain she produced a body of pen-and-ink drawings, 44 of which are now showing at the Mayor Gallery in London. It is the first time they have been seen in public.

In recent years Plath has attained almost mythic status as a feminist cause célèbre. Her poetry is beautiful, if mercilessly dark (her “Collected Poems” won the Pulitzer prize posthumously in 1982). Her novel "The Bell Jar"—the phrase she used to describe her depression—tells the gloomy and sometimes bleakly funny semi-autobiographical story of a young woman's mental collapse: her suicide attempts, hospitalisations, shock treatments and the words exchanged between the protagonist and her psychiatric doctor (“I was surprised to have a woman, I didn't think they had women psychiatrists”). It was an examination of the challenges of being a woman in a man's world (“what I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb”) and the fear surrounding sex, marriage and pregnancy.

The death of her father Otto when she was eight years old seems to have been the catalyst for much of Plath's unhappiness, a tragedy that her turbulent marriage to Hughes did little to assuage. A few months after their relationship fell apart under the pressure of his infidelities, and following a miscarriage, Plath took her own life at the age of 30. Her children, aged one and three, slept in the next room.

At first, the drawings seem extraordinary in their quaint, sunny charm, suggesting the pleasure Plath took in making them. We see semi-illustrative sketches of Parisian rooftops and café life; a kiosk in the Tuileries gardens; a cobbled street in Benidorm. A curly-haired cow chews the cud in the sunshine. Plath also drew a portrait profile of Hughes and, poignantly, a pair of well-worn shoes inscribed “The Bell Jar”.

This mine of tiny, precise drawings has come to light, and to market, from the collection of Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, who inherited the works upon her father's death in 1998. That they were produced in the year of her marriage might suggest that she was, at this point in her life, happy. But the poetry written around the same time leads in the opposite direction:

Last summer's reeds are all engraved in ice
as is your image in my eye; dry frost
glazes the window of my hurt; what solace
can be struck from rock to make heart's waste
grow green again? Who'd walk in this bleak place?

Seen in the shadow of the poetry, the drawings seem empty. They are cold, cartoonish attempts to escape the inner torment that her poetry described.

The Mayor Gallery exhibition is an appropriately modest affair for work often made on scraps of paper torn from a diary. Tucked away in a room behind the main windowed gallery (given over to works by Dadamaino, an Italian artist) Plath's sketches hang tightly together in a line. The words Plath used to describe Hughes, “a voice like the thunder of God”, could just as well be used to speak of her own literary voice, but such a commanding sound is not present here. Rather we hear a soft, private whisper, perhaps even a girlish giggle. This is Sylvia Plath at her most unbearably light.

"Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings" is on at the Mayor Gallery in London until December 17th.

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