________________________________________ Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.2. 2013. Copyright 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.

Reading the Audience Boglrka Kiss

Badia, Janet. Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers. Amherst and Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2011. 202 pages.

It seems that the notoriety of Sylvia Plaths writings amongst the reading public as well as critics has escalated to a level over the past five decades that this phenomenon deserves a study in its own right. Janet Badia herself is an ardent reader of Plaths oeuvre, but this by no means entails an uncritical attitude towards what Plath and her writings have come to represent in literary as well as popular culture. On the contrary, Badia exerts a thoroughly self-reflexive attitude in her book, which makes for one of the best features of Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers. This self-reflexivity is at work from the very first sentence of the book. There, Badia cites Ted Hughes stating that writing about Plath will likely lead to the critics own mental breakdown, neurotic collapse, domestic catastrophe (ix)Badia found herself in this not very inviting scenario when she struggled to get permissions from Hughess estate to reprint published and unpublished material from Hughess archives. As we proceed, we realize that this introduction is a testimony not just to the authors dedication to her project, but to those very mechanisms that Badia aims at exploring: namely, how the image of the Plath reader has evolved over the past fifty years, what it has come to signify, and what effects this whole process has had on Plath scholarship, as well as on how Ted Hughes and Frieda Hughes handle the estate.

As the title of the book already suggests, Badias concern is not solely a historical survey of Plaths readers in literary and popular culture, as she is much rather interested in the mythology that has come about concerning the figure of the Plath reader. This interest stems form a personal, self-reflexive moment: in one of her own critical essays on the figure of a young Plath reader in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, Badia defines herself: As a scholar who once devoured Plaths writings in daily doses, I am intrigued by this figure of the Plath reader (1). What Badia had to realize is that the trope she used to describe her own involvement with Plaths writings is by no means unprecedented. In other words, she had to face the troubling overdetermination of the tropes [she] used to convey this interest . . . : the reliance of literary and popular culture on tropes meant to disparage Plaths fans, especially the young women

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readers among them, as uncritical consumers, as Plath addicts, and even as literary cannibals (2). Thus Badias main interest does not lie in tracing real readers, but ones that are constructed through the discourses of literary and popular culture. So, for Badia, the Plath reader is not an empirical category but a discursive phenomenon, and she traces all those discourses that contribute to the construction of the Plath readers mythology, including literary critics, popular movies and TV shows, Internet fan forums, and the Hughes familys attitude.

This specific interest justifies the fact that although this book has the reading of Plath at its focus, we do not find any analysis of Plaths texts in Badias argumentas Badia herself puts it, her analysis is shamelessly unconcerned with the texts themselves (16). This is in accord with one of her main points, that the fantasy of the Plath reader has nothing to do with Plath or her literary achievement; instead it reveals much more about the ideologies and implicit values of the discourses producing these fantasies. As Badia puts it, the pervasiveness of an exaggerated and distorted rhetoric about these readers tells us far less about Plaths audience and the value or meanings of Plaths writing than about the patriarchal ideologies that allow the very women readers who have bought Plaths books and propelled her success to be turned, ironically, into agents of harm (23). This excerpt already pinpoints the paradoxes these rhetorical strategies induce: although it is Plaths women readers that sustain the interest in her oeuvre, they are seen as ultimately corrupting and damaging Plaths reputation.

One of the causes of this paradox lies in the history of regarding women readers as incapable of making sound aesthetic judgments: Badia offers a concise and informative overview of how women readers were regarded from the eighteenth century on. The essence of these arguments is that women readers are characterized by a very dangerous identifying propensity (4), and their reading habits were defined symptomatically, either as signs of illness or as potential causes of it (4-5). Apart from articulating this threat of mental instability, pathologizing women readers is achieved through another rhetorical strategy as well: their ways of reading were described with tropes of consumption and addiction: understood as physical appetite, reading was seen as supplying the food of the mind, and as such it was understood to be open to the same hazards as any diet (6). Thus the potential literary abuse that women are especially prone to can lead to intellectual opium-eat[ers] hooked on reading and therefore negligent of their domestic duties (6). Badias contribution to the understanding of this problem is that she draws our attention to the fact

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that this apparent danger does not only threaten the mental stability of the readers but might harm the texts themselves, as they will be seen as being of poor quality and definitely not high literature, since they are read and appreciated by (mis)readers who are uncritical and unable to discern the fine line between fiction and reality. As Badia unfolds her argument, we see that both sides of this danger are all too prominently present in what literary and popular culture envisions as the Plath reader: they are constructed in terms of pathologies and as liabilities to the true value of Plaths aesthetics.

Such a congruence is possible due to the continuity of the rhetorical strategies that present and create the idea of the reading woman: throughout the centuries women readers have been discursive constructs and have served as sites onto which particular eras project their cultural anxieties. The presence of this tendency is traced by exploring the literary reception of Plaths writings from the seventies, with special attention to how the womens movements of the seventies are presented in these writings. Acutely conscious of the fact that Plaths reception history has been summarized in the past years, Badia does not want to provide just another survey of Plath criticism. Instead, she traces in the selected reviews the evolution of the trope of the Plath reader as a young, nave, uncritical consumer of literature as well as the construction of Plaths image as the high priestess of damsels in distress.

As the survey of the literary reviews already shows, such a study as Badias is revelatory not just because it sheds light onto various cultural anxieties, but because, as she suggests, these ideas have defined the main tendencies of Plath criticism as well: partly as a reaction against the misreaders who identify their personal problems too much with Plaths writings, this ideology insist that the only responsible way to discuss Plath is through a close reading of her literary texts (16). That is why the author defines her project as interventionist by design (9) and reclaims a prevalent but unappreciated reading strategy as a relevant and legitimate way of interpretation. As Badia says, in looking at an array of decidedly unliterary texts, I hope to add to the more traditional biographical, textual, and psychological approaches to Plath (17). Her choice to deviate from the privileged path of Plath criticism does not mean that she dismisses close reading: her analyses of reviews and other non-literary texts are always meticulous and subtle, and since she understands the woman reader as a discursive phenomenon, she pays special attention to the rhetorical characteristics of the cultural products under inspection.

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After tracing how literary culture positions the Plath reader, Badia turns to the figure of the Plath reader in popular culture: in movies and TV shows. Nothing demonstrates more that Plath, her texts, and the readers of her texts have become signifiers of cultural attitudes than those instances when the mere existence of a Plath book in a characters proximity serves as a sign of her disturbed past, troubled mental state, potential history of suicide attempts, or her status as a nave, uncritical reader. Badia presents examples taken from the popular movies 10 Things I Hate About You and Natural Born Killers as well as from TV series such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Family Guy, and even The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Badia also investigates the fan culture surrounding Plath: the notorious history of Robin Morgans poem Arraignment and its apparent effects (allegedly, the poems fierce, accusing tone, its fantasy of dismembering Ted Hughes, who is held accountable for Plaths suicide, and the feminist attacks that might have been inspired by this poem collectively have led Hughes to retire from public readings) and some exemplary contributions of Sylvia Plaths fan forum on the Internet. Tightly connected to the concern of this chapter is that of the last one, which focuses on Ted Hughess comments on the critics and the audience, who, in Hughess understanding, are a crazy club (128). Through analyzing excerpts from Hughess published and unpublished letters, as well as some of his most well-known poems, such as The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother from Birthday Letters, Badia traces how Hughes assumes the role of Plaths protector while constructing Plath and her work as the victims of the critics and the general publics bad reading practices (132). What is more, we also see glimpses of how this attitude has affected Hughess, and later on, Frieda Hughess, decisions concerning the handling of the Plath estate.

Badias highly informative and revelatory book will surely be a useful and thoroughly enjoyable read for Plath devotees and critics: its arguments are always convincing, its examples demonstrative and even symptomatic, and the index at the end is of great help when trying to locate the intriguing examples Badia cites and analyzes. In the end, Badias book is the best example of the fact that privileging one particular mode of reading always narrows down the polysemy and openness of a text; and as obvious, and at the same time as ironical, as it may sound, Plaths readers are not a liability to her (165).

University of Debrecen