The physical education of Sylvia Plath

Over the last few months, I started reading a profoundly dense biography of Sylvia Plath called Red Comet. I’m almost done (no spoilers, please). But not knowing much of the life behind the writing, I was surprised to find that one of the themes that author Heather Clark pulls out is Plath’s relationship to her body, movement, and the physical world.

The book leaves no doubt that Sylvia was a committed nerd, a once-in-a-generation star student to her Smith professors.[^1] She was also sensitive about her relationship with truth and reality, her brief and destabilizing turn in the flashy marketing-driven women’s magazine world being one of the big contributing factors to her first suicide attempt that she auto-fictioned into The Bell Jar. But for so bookish and sensitive a girl, you might not guess that she was kind of a jock.

It began for Sylvia with her relationship to the ocean while she lived in Winthrop, MA, in a house facing the Boston harbor. “I enjoyed lying for hours in the bright, white sand, gazing at the sparkling blue-green waves,” she wrote. The sea became a recurring theme in her poetry, what she later called “a central metaphor for my childhood.” From ages 10 to 15, she spent time every summer at a Girl Scout-affiliated camp, where she “made fires, rowed boats, hiked, swam, and learned archery,” and loved every minute of it. I got frissons of Harriet the Spy from reading her write about how she didn't want to give up plaiting her hair in two long braids for more grown-up styles.

Later, she played guard on the JV basketball team (”physical exertion eased her academic and social anxiety,” Clark wrote), and in college, pre-suicide attempt, would spend an hour each day playing sports in the gym to “un-tense.” Post-suicide attempt, she joined the crew team of her college dorm and told one of her boyfriends at the time, “it does me no end of good to be out on the water in a shell … the feeling of pulling hard and skimming along in a unanimous sweat of stroking is really potent!”[^2] The reconnection to herself lead to a creative reawakening, when “she thought she would ‘explode’ with new poems in the spring.”

Clark wrote that “Many Smith friends recalled her love of the outdoors and her attention to colors and patterns in nature—a stone wall, or bark on a tree. [One] remembered her saying, ‘Let’s get out in a bike and ride. Let’s go skating. Let’s do something.’” Another college boyfriend “understood her appreciation for ‘the daily texture of life with a keen awareness and joy in small, colorful things from the sight of a flicker on the grass to the sound of rain on a tin roof.’” Several friends recall her overall voracious appetite for life, and for food—”she one emptied a host’s refrigerator before a dinner party,” Clark wrote.