“We See–Comparatively–” Reading Rich/Reading Plath/Reading Dickinson

Following Adrienne Rich’s seminal essays “Vesuvius at Home” and “When We dead Awaken,” theories of influence among women poets have accorded both Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson the status of paradigms. However, Plath’s Letters Home and Journals reveal that her own relationship to Dickinson (as well as to Rich) was characterized by intense ambivalence, anxiety, aggression and complex nuances of longing. Dickinson’s renunciation of marriage and increasingly sequestered life proved anathema to Plath’s need to make creativity and procreativity coincide; moreover, part of Plath’s classic “double bind” derived from her belief in what Rich would later call “the divisive and . . . destructive myth of the special woman, who is also the token woman.” Yet Dickinson is the one woman poet whose influence indisputably marks each phase of Plath’s development. The final phase of Plath’s poetry, orally based and marked by the signature dash, evinces the richness as well as the ambiguity of her life-long relationship to Dickinson, and the thoroughness with which she absorbed and transformed the voice of her greatest female rival.