Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
Kate Moses, 2003
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400035007
Summary
This is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered, shutting up her beloved Devonshire house and making a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal and to resist her mother's engulfing love. It is the story of Sylvia Plath.
In this deeply felt novel, Kate Moses recreates Sylvia Plath's last months, weaving in the background of her life before she met Ted Hughes through to the disintegration of their relationship and the burst of creativity this triggered. It is inspired by Plath's original ordering and selection of the poems in Ariel, which begins with the word 'love' and ends with 'spring,' a mythic narrative of defiant survival quite different from the chronological version edited by Hughes.
At Wintering's heart, though, lie the two weeks in December when Plath finds herself still alone and grief-stricken, despite all her determined hope. With exceptional empathy and lyrical grace, Moses captures her poignant, untenable and courageous struggle to confront not only her future as a woman, an artist and a mother, but the unbanished demons of her past. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 9, 1962
• Where— San Francisco, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of the Pacific
• Awards—American Book Award
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
In her words
From a Barnes & Noble interview
• I'm a seventh-generation Californian, and my great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, daughter, and myself were all born in San Francisco — my mother, daughter, and myself all at the same hospital.
• I decided I would be a writer when I was four years old, while sitting at my mother's feet as she sewed on her mother's old Singer sewing machine and told family stories with her mother and sisters (my grandmother and aunts). As little snips of fabric snowed down on me and I listened — unobserved — to the stories told by the women in my family, I suddenly realized that's all I wanted to do with my life: to tell stories.
• I have never been to a writing workshop, retreat, or residency program. The only writing class I ever took was as a sophomore in college, and I ended up dropping out of school for the semester and getting an Incomplete for the class. After college graduation I talked my way into a job as an editor at a small literary trade publishing house called North Point Press in Berkeley, California: My strategy was to learn to write, surreptitiously, by working with 'real' writers. I published my first short story when I was 23; the story was part of a fiction competition and was published with my photograph. Someone recognized me in the grocery store and I was so appalled to have my imagination made so public and personal that I didn't submit another piece of fiction to a publisher until Wintering, 14 years later.
• Though childhood convinced me that I was going to be a writer, motherhood is what gave me my subject. I don't think I had anything worth writing about until I started re-experiencing the world through the eyes of my children; it is the assembly of the self — through childhood, through relationships with other people, through parenthood — that fascinates me as a writer as well as a reader.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is what she said:
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. This was the first "adult" book that I ever read. I was 12 years old, and though I had decided by the age of 4 that I wanted to be a writer — a "storyteller" is how I thought of it then — it wasn't until I read The Yearling that I felt the imprint of an author's voice and heart and conscience on the story being told. The Yearling was my first exposure to the idea of a writer's craft: that a story is told through a writer's imagining of it, that the story didn't merely exist as a complete and separate entity.
As I read, I could detect how Mrs. Rawlings got inside the hearts and minds of each of her characters, and that they came alive, with all their frailties and dreams and losses, through her. Not only did the story of Jody and his love for his fawn, for his suffering parents and neighbors, lift off the pages for me, but so did their author. This, I realized for the first time, is what a genuine writer can do — put blood in the veins of characters who could not exist without her, and transmit them, feeling and alive, to a reader, and all of it through words. Many years later it sank in that this literary epiphany was given to me by a woman writer, making this book and what it means to me all the sweeter. (Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
This exceptional first novel, shot through with a fierce poetic luminosity that almost matches that of Moses's much-written-about subject, covers the last few months of the poet's life as she cares for her sick children in the middle of a brutal London winter, struggling to write her last poems and recover from the defection of husband Ted Hughes. Moses is frank, in a long afterword, about her sources—which include Plath's letters and journals—and about what she has made up or merely surmised. But the key question is whether the book succeeds as a compelling piece of fiction, and the answer is that it does, triumphantly. Moses moves deftly back and forth in time, from the couple's last months in their beloved but moldering Devonshire hideaway through Plath's first suspicions of Hughes's infidelities to her arrival in London. Moses catches the quality of English life, particularly its austere inconveniences and its moody weather, with remarkable fluency, and her habitation of Plath's body and mind feels complete. At the same time, she offers scenes that show how awkward and bloody minded the poet could sometimes be. It is not a sentimental book, but rather one that evokes Plath's fierce joy in words and images and her huge motherly courage in the face of crippling adversity, with lacerating episodes like the one in which she makes a desperate call from a phone box in the rain while her children peer in at her uncomprehendingly. In the end one wonders not how Plath came to kill herself but how she survived so long. This beautifully written novel may offend literary purists, but most readers will find it moving almost beyond words.
Publishers Weekly
Moses traces the source of Plath's unsustainable drive and sensitivity and their tragic consequences with empathic artistry. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
The last days of poet Sylvia Plath, as seen by a co-editor of the anthology Mothers Who Think (as well as co-founder of Salon.com s feature of the same name). Plath s tragic end has been so horribly romanticized that it has almost overshadowed the life and work that led up to it. A poetic prodigy, Plath (1932-63) won a scholarship to Smith College and began publishing verse while still a student. Her first mental breakdown (vividly described later in her novel The Bell Jar) came during her junior year at Smith, but she quickly made a name for herself as a poet and, in 1955, won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge. There, she met and married English poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had two children. Moses concentrates her entire story on the winter of 1962, when Plath was facing the recent collapse of her marriage (Hughes had fallen in love with another woman) along with the first full flowering of her success as a major poet. Having published her first book of verse (The Colossus) in 1960, Plath had now begun writing in a more intensely personal style, composing works that depicted and arose from the failure of her marriage. As Plath moved back and forth between her house in Devon and her London flat, her life became increasingly scattered and disorienting. First-novelist Moses convincingly portrays the stress that finally overcame the poet as she went about her daily routines recording for the BBC, looking after her children, receiving visits from literary friends and from her mother haunted by her husband s rejection of her and by her growing discomfort at the necessity of constructing her poetry from the raw elements of an increasingly unhappy life. We don't see the suicide, but by the story's end it is clear that Plath has painted herself into an emotional corner leaving no other way out. Rich and harrowing, told with none of the sensationalism or cheap sentiment that has undermined so many accounts of Plath s life and end.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems are almost all written from the first person point of view, yet Wintering's narrative is told in the third person. Why do you think the author chose this perspective? What role does perspective play in the novel?
2. Describe Ted Hughes as portrayed in Wintering. Do you think he is fully committed to his marriage to Sylvia? How do you account for his decision to enter into an affair with Assia?
3. In Chapter 29, "The Moon and the Yew Tree", Ted hesitates to tell Sylvia what he really thinks of her poem. What are the consequences of his hesitation, and of Sylvia's refusal to acknowledge the darkness of her world view as she expresses it in her poem? What do Ted and Sylvia's choices in this chapter tell us about each of them, about their marriage, and about the idea of faith?
4. What symbolic role does the ocean play in Sylvia's imagination? How does it relate to her relationship with her mother?
5. What do you think is Sylvia's opinion of herself as a mother? How does Sylvia's longing for fertility — both as a mother and as an artist — impact her sense of self as she assembles her Ariel manuscript?
6. The telephone plays an important role — almost that of a character — in Wintering. How does the telephone affect Sylvia's sense of personal success and failure, and of "solving the problem of herself"?
7. There are various references to religion in Wintering. For example, Sylvia's voyeuristic desire to attend services at the church next to Court Green in Chapter 29, "The Moon and the Yew Tree"; her belief that "her god is dead, again" in Chapter 15, "Ariel"; her walk through the rainy churchyard in Chapter 12, "Elm"; her recalling of the famous lines about faith, hope and charity from I Corinthians in Chapter 19, "The Other"; her memory of an old Catholic chorale about the Christmas rose in Chapter 40, "The Swarm." What is the author telling us about Sylvia's relationship to organized religion? To faith?
8. The chapter titles in Wintering are taken directly from the poem titles, in Sylvia Plath's intended order, of Ariel and Other Poems. Yet Wintering's chapters do not necessarily refer in overt ways to their poetic counterparts. Think about the chapter titles and what the author might be telling us about Sylvia and her relationship to the story she is constructing through her manuscript. For example, what is the author saying about Chapter 3, "Thalidomide"? Or Chapter 10, "The Jailor"? Or Chapter 30, "A Birthday Present"?
9. In Chapter 1, Sylvia thinks of herself as a "poet at rest." The author tells us that the real Sylvia Plath began writing poetry again at the very end of December 1962, within days of the confrontation at Ted's borrowed apartment depicted in Chapter 40, "The Swarm." What does the novel tell us about why Sylvia would be moved to begin writing poetry again? Do you think the poems written during the last weeks of Sylvia Plath's life came from the same inspiration that produced her artistic output of the fall of 1962?
10. "The ones you love will leave you": this is the statement that Sylvia believes is her intuitive gift of understanding in Chapter 15, "Ariel". How does this relate to the themes of faith and fate that are threaded throughout Wintering? What relationship does it have to Chapter 20, "Stopped Dead," in which the myth of Arachne and Sylvia's viewing of the film "Through a Glass Darkly" are entwined?
11. We are told that the anagram Sylvia imagines at the end of Chapter 40, "The Swarm," tells her "you are ash." How does this symbolic statement relate to Sylvia's defiant independence in Chapter 15, "Ariel", when she rides at sunrise on the morning of her thirtieth birthday?
12. In Chapter 34, "Daddy," Sylvia's father appears only remotely. What is the author telling us about Sylvia Plath's notorious poem?
13. The locations depicted in Wintering are all real, and interestingly, most are on hilltops: Cawsand Hill in Dartmoor, the setting of Sylvia's ride on the horse Ariel; Court Green and its neighboring church and the local playground overlooking the village of North Tawton; Smith College; the Primrose Hill neighborhood in London. In an autobiographical essay the real Plath wrote for the BBC just weeks before her death, she stated that the pride of mountains terrified her, and she found the stillness of hills stifling. What do these hilltop settings, where so many of the most significant events of her life occur, tell us about Sylvia's character?
14. Sylvia Plath has long been considered a feminist icon. Yet Sylvia's relationship to most of the female characters in Wintering — her mother, Dido Merwin, Assia Wevill, her neighbors in North Tawton and in Primrose Hill — can be described as conflicted at best. "I so rarely get any girl talk," Sylvia says to Assia while talking in the garden in Chapter 6, "Barren Woman." What do you think of the statement about Wintering made by biographer Diane Middlebrook: "I've never read a more womanly book"? Do you think Sylvia is a feminist?
15. Wintering opens with an image of golden sight and a metaphoric ocean, and ends with a related image of golden sight and another imagined ocean. What is the author telling us with this pair of symbols?
16. One of the themes that runs through Wintering is that of different art forms responding to each other: fiction to poetry, poetry to film, poetry to music, poetry to visual art. How does the fictional aspect of Wintering respond to the poetry that was its inspiration?
17. Sylvia Plath's manuscript for Ariel and Other Poems, which she told Ted Hughes began with the word "love" and ended with the word "spring", has never been published. Now that you know how Sylvia Plath envisioned Ariel, does it change the way you think of Plath as an artist or as a woman? As a mother?
18. The author has chosen not to depict Sylvia's suicide in Wintering, ending the novel a few weeks before her death. Why? Plath biographer Anne Stevenson has written of Wintering that "Everyone who seeks a valid, impartial explanation for Plath's suicide should read this book." Does Wintering aid in your understanding of why the real Sylvia Plath killed herself?
(Questions issued by publisher.)