Doubling Over: Sylvia Plath’s College Thesis
This weekend I had the opportunity to read Sylvia Plath’s college thesis on Doubles(The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Doestoevsky’s Novels) in the work’s of Dostoevsky. I requested it through ILL from the state library, and expected to get a reprinted version. Instead I got a copy from the Smith Library, house of Plath’s archives, which is a mimeographed copy of the original types manuscript, including hand written sections where the typewriter letters are too light to read. It smells as musky as a book that’s been on the shelf for a half century should.
I was interested in reading her thesis because I love her use of doubles and shadows and splitting in her work. I thinks it is what draws me too it. There is a Cartesian violence at play in her words, a self that is traumatically divided and forced back together. I was hoping her thesis would give some insight into this aspect of her poetry.
The thesis itself is not very original. It’s a solid A-, B+ paper, but not something that would indicate the artistic genius of its creator. Basically, it’s a very proficient college thesis, which makes its points, quotes it’s source material, cites authority, and concludes without adding much new to the dialogue. The paper examines Doubles in two works of Dostoevsy, The Double and The Brothers Karamazov (Ivan and Pavel, Ivan and the Devil).
Her fundamental point, that Doubles enable the author to examine aspects of a characters through their extremes and obverse manifestations, is astute, and she provides plentiful examples. I was a little surprised that she agreed with critics who found The Double to be an artistic failure because it didn’t clearly delineate hallucination and reality, but this was more an acquiescence to sources than an argument she really expresses.
What is most interesting, however, is what she wants to do with the work, but fails to. She seems to be trying to mix anthropology, modern (at the time) psychoanalysis, and literary theory. She cites the Golden Bough, which would figure in some of the symbolism of her work, as well as Otto Ranks The Double as Immortal Self. The thesis shows an early interest in some themes that would recur in her work, and a capable critical mind when reading great writing. She writes about the fundamental dualistic nature of man, and the paradoxes within men, and how literary doubles help illuminate these natures. Her selection of Dostoevsky, known for the great internal nature of his writing, is also telling considering the deeply personal and psychological nature of her own poetry.
She also briefly touches on modern psychoanalysis and schizophrenia, although as someone who wrote a similarly un-original college thesis debunking popular conceptions of schizophrenia, I found her comments about the scientific evidence about psychoanalysis to be concerning. If anything, it was the least scientific of the psychological disciplines, even if it was the dominant paradigm of the time. Jung and Freud wouldn’t know a double blind study if they walked into it.
Overall I thought reading her thesis was an worthwhile exercise, if for no other reason than the excitement of holding her original work. There is a power in objects. As hokey as it sounds, I feel that rare books have a certain mystical resonance. Also, seeing the lesser early work of a great artist always makes me feel better about my own efforts. I think if I want to continue looking into Plath perhaps reading her poetry in light of her source material for this thesis, may be an interesting way to approach her work. But for now, I have other things to read.
