Tea at Trianon: Sylvia Plath, 1950s Psychiatry, and Confessional Poets

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 27, 2022

Sylvia Plath, 1950s Psychiatry, and Confessional Poets

From Literary Hub:

Before I wrote my first book, I was a licensed psychotherapist. I wound up doing some postgraduate work at a Northern California mental hospital. (Coincidentally, it was the same mental hospital where Ken Kesey worked when the experience inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) When you walked into the mental ward, there was a waiting room and a little kiosk with used books. I noticed one day that The Bell Jar was in it.

I’d read the novel by Sylvia Plath when I was younger. I can’t exactly remember when I read it—I guess in some ways it’s always just been there in my psyche. But this time, as I reread it, I realized that this semi-autobiographical novel was so much more than just the story of a young girl hospitalized for manic depression; it was also telling a parallel story of the birth of a radical literary movement known as Confessional Poetry.

Like Sylvia, the mainstays of this poetry movement—poets like Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton—were diagnosed with manic depression and subsequently hospitalized. In the late 50s and early 1960s, they all found themselves in Boston, Massachusetts, writing poetry that was raw and honest about subjects that were, at that time, totally taboo. I wanted to tell this story. (Read more.)