murasaki's Full Review: Kate Moses - Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath holds a certain sense of immediacy for me. I am about to leave Northampton, the location of Smith College where Plath attended as an undergraduate and then later taught. Smith College’s archive is a treasure trove of Plath memorabilia from drafts of her poems, her journals, letters, even notes from classes and the books she read and annotated (the other repository for Plath scholars is the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana in Bloomington). This semester, my final hurrah in graduate school, only one other master’s student and I opted to write master’s theses. My compatriot, with whom I shared many late night phone calls and writer’s block panics, is a Plath scholar and wrote her thesis on how Plath’s reading of Virginia Woolf novels influenced Plath’s own writing. What with The Hours released in theatres, discussion over the casting of Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in an upcoming movie, a book signing by Kate Moses at a local indie bookstore, and all of these other things, Wintering just seems another part of the literary resonance in my life at this moment.
The Plot
Wintering opens with Sylvia Plath’s first morning with her children in a flat she rented in Yeats’s old house in London after her separation from her husband, poet Ted Hughes. Sylvia is in the process of making a new life for herself after she could no longer ignore Ted’s affairs and can no longer stay in the house they bought together in Devon, Court Green, where she feels that all her happiness was built on a lie. Sylvia tries to cope with two children, one two years old, the other not quite one and still nursing, while trying to unpack and get settled in the flat, and, most saliently, trying to order her manuscript for Ariel drawn from the flurry of poems she wrote over the last few months as her marriage fell apart.
Wintering follows Plath from December 12, 1962 until December 29, 1962, interspersed with flashback chapters that reach back as far as 1958 but mostly concentrate on the summer and autumn before when Sylvia realizes that Ted is cheating on her and that she wants a divorce. Sylvia also wants time to write, something she’s not getting when she’s saddled with all of the childcare responsibilities as Ted slips away to see his mistress, and she cannot find an adequate nanny.
This novel, ultimately, is about the disintegration of a marriage, and the disintegration of a woman who has placed too much importance on being a wife and is struggling to redefine herself as a poet.
Elements of Style
Wintering has 41 chapters, the same number as the poems in Ariel. However, Ted Hughes published Ariel after Sylvia’s suicide; he reordered the poems in the manuscript and removed some poems and substituted them with others that she had written previously. Moses resurrects Plath’s ordering of her poems--Plath wanted the first word of Ariel to be “love” and the last word to be “spring”--and uses the titles of the poems originally intended for Ariel as her chapter titles. I did have a copy of Ariel handy and read the poem associated with each chapter before reading the chapter itself. Since only the Collected Poems has all of the poems that Hughes purged from Ariel, I was not able to read every poem for every chapter, but I would like to encourage future readers of Wintering to do so. I think my appreciation of Moses’s prose was heightened when imagery from the chapter’s title poem would appear in the chapter or when a chapter recounted the events that led up to the writing of its title poem. I probably missed some significant points because I did not have a copy of the Collected Poems at hand as I read Wintering.
In addition to the ingenious framework, Moses’s writing style flows easily from third person descriptions to Sylvia’s thoughts to narrated memories. Moses herself has a way with words that infuses her prose with poetry, particularly apt given the subject of the novel, yet also blends in the messy realities of toddlers and a single mother whose world has broken into fragments and is desperately trying to hold everything together for her children and herself. Most poignant, I suppose, is the reader’s knowledge that Sylvia Plath took her own life not even two months after the end of Wintering. Despite all of Plath’s efforts to regain her equilibrium, I knew what was coming toward her throughout the novel, but now I also understand better why she may have taken her own life.
(And just for the record, one often hears that Plath committed suicide by “sticking her head in an oven.” Although she did put her head in an oven, that’s not what killed her. Plath died from asphyxiation by turning on the gas of her oven and not lighting the flame to produce the oven’s heat. Her death was quite peaceful, her cheek pillowed on a dishcloth in the oven, not the gore conjured up, in the minds of elementary school students, by statements about heads in ovens.)
Overall
Sylvia Plath was an amazingly talented and intelligent women, poet and mother--I can only speculate what her genius would have produced if she had lived past the age of 30. Although Wintering is a fictionalized account of some of the last months of Plath’s life, Kate Moses has more than done justice to Sylvia Plath’s memory.
This engrossing debut novel depicts Sylvia Plath s feverish artistic process in the bitter aftermath of her failed marriage to Ted Hughes--the few exc...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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