“I’m willing to let you know me if you’ll do the same”: Sylvia Plath’s Redemption of Bill the Veteran in “Brief Encounter”

Abstract

When Sylvia Plath, journaling about a first date with a Korean War veteran in the winter of 1950, writes of her eagerness to learn about war, she articulates a curiosity that pervades her work, and emphatically includes herself in war-related and otherwise political conversations that may seem outside the realm of proper Smith girl experiences. “‘What’s it like to fight? to kill someone?’ (Your curiosity is aflame. Granted you can’t be a man, but he can tell you how it was)” she writes in her journal, her political interest clearly piqued (41). Significantly, her acute interest in what fighting is like, what the masculine experience of war is like, parallels a different sort of interest: she is on a date, after all, and her inter est in Bill’s war experience is intertwined on the page with her interest in Bill’s sexual experience; her curiosity about war’s violence is connected here with an experience of sexual violence, an experience that leaves Plath shaken, angry, and acutely aware of her own frustrated desire (Journals 43). In her description of this encounter in her journal, Plath seems acutely aware of the connection between the political and the personal; further, the misunderstandings and the violence with which interpersonal relationships are fraught reflect war’s violence, war being perhaps the ultimate example of the failure of human relationship. Throughout her work, Plath presents a solution, over and over again, 1 to this problem: the alienating effects of war experience can be ameliorated through caring, and diverse, inter personal relationships. Her story “Brief Encounter,” I argue here, is one place where Plath presents this solution. In this story, Plath takes a fledgling relationship fraught with violence and misunderstanding, and transforms it through her art into an encounter that offers healing and reconciliation, especially for the veteran, who has experienced the most violence in the course of the war, as well as acute alienation after coming home. Analysis of the relationship between the personal and the political in Plath’s work pervades much of Plath scholarship. “I’m rather a political person,” Sylvia Plath told Peter Orr in a 1962 interview for the BBC; many Plath scholars, with the notable exception of Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert, 2 take Plath’s words to Orr seriously. They consider how her work reflects the political climate in which it was written, charting the ways in which Plath’s letters, visual art, poetry, journals, and fiction address and integrate her political questions and concerns: about the haunting presence of WWII; about the distant threat of the Korean War in the early fifties; about the Cold War’s bomb scares and the threat of ultimate destruction posed by nuclear weapons. Concerning Plath’s poetry, Stan Smith argues in his 1982 book Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry that: “It is precisely because her poetry is intensely private that it records so profoundly and distinctly the experience of living in history. In Plath’s poetry, there is no gap between private and public” (202); Al Strangeways makes a similar assertion in Sylvia Plath: The Shaping of Shadows, in 1998. Tracy Brain, writing nearly two decades after Smith, again makes a very similar statement: “By taking Plath’s writing away from the conventional personal readings to which it is customarily subjected, we see that her poems and fiction…are deeply, politically engaged with the world” (36-7). Even more recently, Robin Peel charts the intersections between Cold War politics and Plath’s late work in Writing Back, arguing that Plath’s political thought crystallized in the early 1960s; Luke Ferretter discusses the relationship between Plath’s politics and her fiction in Sylvia Plath’s Fiction: A Critical Study; and Langdon Hammer points out how Plath’s thoughts about politics is expressed in her visual art, from the cover of her eighth grade history project to her collage of Cold War images in 1962. 3 To this fabric of Plath criticism I will, in the following pages, contribute a thread. Building on Smith’s statement that, in Plath’s work, “there is no gap between public and private,” and Brain’s assertion that Plath’s work, while often subjected to “conventional personal readings,” is also “deeply, politically en gaged with the world,” I will consider how Plath transforms one specific personal experience artistically in a way that, first, shows an acute desire to be involved in politics, and second, shows that the solution to war’s destructive effects on society is to build interpersonal relationships, particularly, here, relation ships of understanding and respect between the sexes. The relationship I consider here, one that, in my view, makes its way into Plath’s fiction, is a brief and eventually violent encounter with an “older,”

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