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Plath, domesticity, and the art of advertising
College Literature, Summer 2002 by Bryant, Marsha
Sylvia Plath is not only one of America's major poets, but also literary culture's ultimate commodity. In 1998 she earned a spot in Time magazine's special issue, "100 Artists and Entertainers of the Century." More recently, the New Yorker ran a full-page blowup of the Plath most ingrained in our collective memory-the smiling, long-legged coed in a white, two-piece swimsuit.1 Looking like an advertising model instead of a famous poet, this Plath hooks the reader to sample a new and improved product, the Unabridged Journals. In this essay, I am less interested in Plath's commodification than I am in the ways her writing prompts new ways of thinking about American advertising and vice versa. Like Plath's confessional poems, ads construct drama through inflated rhetoric and outrageous claims. And like Plath's poems, fifties ads transformed domestic space into a dreamscape of daily miracles. In Plath's "Fever 103 deg" a delirious speaker ascends from her domestic enclosure with cherubim; in a Baker's Angel Flake ad from 1956, a "coconutty" housewife ascends from her domestic enclosure with cake wings.2 We tend to view the former image as more artistic and "private" and the latter as more commercial and "public." But both dramatize domesticity by investing the woman with supernatural powers. Moreover, each text's high flying speaker occupies a position somewhere between compulsion and choice-a crucial issue in Plath's work. In advertising, the poet found strategies for creating the direct, immediate language and surreal images that would launch the Ariel volume's ascent up the sales charts.
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Most critics argue that Plath rebels against cultural norms, but her interactions with advertising extend beyond the stance of parody or satire. In The Bell Jar, for example, the protagonist mocks a disc jockey's "white toothpaste-- ad smile," but she also imagines escaping her awkwardness through the reified "blue light" of a vodka advertisement (1971, 7-8). Writing her mother from Cambridge, Plath declares that she will transform her kitchen into "an ad out of House and Garden with Ted's help," hardly the bohemian image we expect from someone seeking to become the female equivalent of W.B.Yeats (1975, 283). Unabridged Journals reveals that the poet and her husband entered several ad slogan contests during 1958:
the Dole pineapple & Heinz ketchup contests close this week, but the French's mustard, fruit-blended oatmeal & Slenderella & Libby-tomato juice contests don't close till the end of May.We stand to win five cars, two weeks in Paris, a year's free food, and innumerable iceboxes & refrigerators and all our debts paid. Glory glory. (Plath 2000, 365)
Anxious about money, Plath frets, "If only by a freak we could win one of those oatmeal-naming contests" (2000,380). So advertising was very much on her mind as she produced the work that would appear in her first volume, The Colossus. Plath did not always perceive advertising to be a "dangerously powerful" force that degrades women, as Janice Markey has claimed (1993, 92). Rather, the poet reiterates and revises, coincides and collides with American advertising and its representations of domesticity.
Garry Leonard has argued perceptively that Plath had a similarly conflicted stance toward beauty products advertised in Mademoiselle: "She wishes to speak as a subject against the dehumanizing commodity culture, while at the same time preserving-even improving-her 'feminine' allure as a valuable object within this same culture" (1992, 63).While his analysis assesses advertising images of young women who commodify their bodies for the marriage market, mine focuses on images of housewives who purchase commodities for their homes. In the 1950s, housewives were America's primary consumers, and they chose their products during a period in which "gross annual advertising expenditures quadrupled" (Sivulka 1998, 240). It was also the decade in which the Nixon-Krushchev "kitchen debate" proved that household appliances were vital symbols of the American dream. When Plath brought this cultural network into her poetry, she tapped what Robert Von Hallberg has called "the irreducible center of public life" (1985, 4). In other words, advertising may prove Plath more mainstream than we think.
This essay will argue that the rhetoric, images, and mythologies of American advertising prove as crucial as psychological contexts in understanding Plath's construction of domesticity. In the heightened space of magazine and television ads, the postwar "dream house" became increasingly surreal: food could talk, housewives could levitate, appliances could marry. Normalized in the pages of mainstream magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, this kitchen craziness should prompt us to complicate the claim that Plath's mental illness is the primary factor in what Marjorie Perloff has termed her "peculiar ability to fuse the domestic and the hallucinatory" (1985, 283). My essay will also consider advertisements as a means of rethinking Plath's portrayal of female agency in American consumer culture. For Betty Friedan, ads targeting 1950s housewives disempowered women by confining them to their kitchens, thus excluding them from the larger, patriarchal world. For James B. Twitchell, targeted ads like Miss Clairol's "Does she ... or doesn't she?" prove more exclusive than excluding; he finds empowering their "knowing implication that excluded men" (2000, 123). My analysis of Plath and advertising seeks a position between these opposing views, arguing that the women in Plath's poems occupy the ambiguous position of housewife-consumer. I will first note the ways that the ads and poems construct a surreal domesticity, and then examine the gender and economic relations that sustained the crazy kitchen.
