I want to couch these names in a paragraph so you don't inadvertently read them. But you did anyway, didn't you? I own both the single and complete editions of Sylvia Plath's poetry and her only novel The Bell Jar. And the only poems whose lines I know by heart (my memory is probably more woolly than my sheep) are Emily Dickinson's: "Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me / The carriage held but just ourselves / And immortality..."
I discovered Dickinson first, as a hardcover Christmas gift, the corners of the pages of which are now dirty with thumb prints. I opened the book (then probably smelled the pages) and fell into step with her poems. "Tell the Truth but tell it slant / Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth's superb surprise."
Later, in Grade 11, we were assigned to collect different works (prose, poetry, biography, etc.) around a theme of our choice (copyright be damned). I decided to choose works and then find the theme that tied them together (which, yes, means I couldn't think of anything). So I did as asked and, upon reviewing the texts to try to find my theme, found that every piece I had chosen was written by a woman and most were about some aspect of the female experience.
And that was how I discovered Sylvia Plath. I can't remember the exact poem I chose, but her poem Stillborn describes my current frustration with my creative process: "These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis. / They grew their toes and fingers well enough, / Their little foreheads bulged in concentration."
Reeling, I tripped over Virginia Woolf and her essay A Room of One's Own. (Remember that I'm a dinosaur and this was before the ubiquity of the internet, so all this research was done, like, in a library and *gasp* by hand.) I lifted the opening paragraph of the text, without (I confess) reading the entire essay: "All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point -- a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved."
A few years later, I spent a few wintry afternoons reclining in the sun, lost in a paperback of The Waves (which smelled like all books should smell), which was up until then the greatest novel I had ever read. Dickinson mastered stream of consciousness, using it to erode boundaries without losing clarity -- I'm thinking of characters here, because characters were all I cared about back then; plot be damned!
So, what's predictable about these writers, you ask, predictably?
What's predictable is that these poets and writers have been adopted ad nauseum to illustrate the feminist cause. They've been held up as examples that women are worthy, as successful women in a 'man's world' -- which almost immediately became a women's world! (Writing poetry and novels was seen as a 'man's work' until the early twentieth century when women authors 'corrupted' the profession, feminising it.)
We adopted them and their work until they became passe and ignoring them became an equally feminist action. Now, being a lover of the works of Dickinson, Woolf and Plath is a phase you go through, like dying your hair some outrageous colour or ... being a feminist.
In this, I'm prepared to be predictable, my livestock (to stretch the metaphor to its breaking point like a frayed elastic band) the purest white.
