Sylvia Plath's Fiction by Ferretter Luke;

Author:Ferretter, Luke;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

The Reader's Digest, despite its apparently neutral form as a summary of current writing, was staunchly anti-Communist. It featured articles such as ‘Why We Must Outlaw the Communist Party’, ‘Red Spy Masters in America’ and ‘The FBI Wants You’, which begins, ‘You have been asked by the President to help in the most important man hunt in our history – the rooting out of Communist spies in America’.66 In ‘The Communists Are After Our Minds’, published in The American Magazine in October 1954, Hoover writes that ‘the Red conspirators in our midst’ are waging a ‘relentless campaign to pervert our thinking and undermine our freedoms’.67 In sentencing the Rosenbergs, Judge Irving Kaufman wrote that their crime was ‘worse than murder’. Although no evidence had been presented to this effect, and although it would have been irrelevant to the crime with which they were charged if it had been presented, Kaufman argued that the Rosenbergs had ‘caused . . . the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand, and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason’.68 As Communist spies, the Rosenbergs represented the most terrible, the most unacceptable form of identity possible in Esther's society.

Ethel Rosenberg in particular represented for Plath a woman who failed to be all that society required a woman to be. Plath may have read newspaper and magazine reports, based on Ethel's apparent lack of emotion on the witness stand, that she was the dominant partner in the marriage and the conspiracy. This view reached as far as President Eisenhower, who wrote to his son that, whilst it went ‘against the grain’ to allow a woman to be executed, there were more important facts to consider. In particular, he wrote, Ethel was the ‘strong and recalcitrant character’ and her husband the ‘weak one’: ‘she has obviously been the leader of everything they did in the spy ring’.69 Since Ethel does not conform to Eisenhower's concept of what a woman ought to be, a member of the weaker sex, he allows himself to supersede his chivalrous instinct to protect her. Hoover, the driving force behind the convictions, who had idealised his own mother and held a highly conservative view of motherhood, was also reluctant to send Ethel to her death, until he convinced himself that she was a bad mother.70 There was testimony to this effect at the trial.71 In fact, although devoted to her children, Ethel had found it difficult to cope with them, and in 1949 had suffered a nervous breakdown and begun psychotherapy. Esther identifies with the Rosenbergs because, like them, and like Ethel in particular, she sees no place for herself in American society. She closely identifies with them because she feels that her inner life, her secret self, is as unacceptable to society as theirs.

Plath repeatedly expresses a fantasy in which the corruption beneath the surface of her skin is about to bubble out through her eyes. In ‘Tongues of

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