The afterlife of Sylvia Plath: work mutilation, censorship of a life

Abstract

By analyzing censorship imposed on Sylvia Plath’s posthumous published works, this paper raises the destinations which Sylvia Plath’s name and image took after her death. Three publications were investigated: Ariel, Letters Home by Sylvia Plath and The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Through Rose (2013), Malcolm (2012) and Carvalho (2003), this research determines that such interventions aimed to offer an image of the author which was more convenient to those responsible for her estate. It also distinguishes the roles of the public and the critics in receiving those first editions and ascertains the impossibility of capturing Plath into a rigid identity, since the biographical elements used in her works are closer to a subjectivation process than to fixing a unique truth.