This blog discusses the movie Dirty Dancing, which was released in 1987 and starred Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. The articles discuss:
* literary aspects, such as characterization, motivation, interactions;
* the music and dances;
* the production of the movie;
* critical reactions.
You can select all articles at once by clicking on the Sylvia Plath label (tag) in this blog's right margin.
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In Part 8, I argued that Baby Houseman displayed the following indications of suffering from manic-depressive (aka bipolar) disorder, Type 2.
* Her parents perceived that she was a danger to herself.
* She was perceived as intending "to change the world".
* She intended to read a lot of thick, serious books during her vacation.
* Her appetite was sometimes voracious.
* She remained mostly alone during her vacation's first week.
* She chased after Johnny Castle in an bold manner.
I wrote that Part 8 two months ago. Before I wrote this concluding Part 9, I wanted to develop the idea that Baby's conduct in the movie Dirty Dancing is largely unethical. Today I completed a two-part series (Part 1, Part 2) on that subject, and so now I will use that idea to elaborate my argument about Baby's disorder.
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In my Part 6 about Sylvia Plath, I provided the following video explanation done by Dr. Manuel Astruc, a psychiatrist specializing in mood disorders. Watching this video explanation again would be a good preparation for your reading my following discussion.
Manic-depressive disorder commonly develops at about Baby's age, which is 17 years old. At around this same age, normal adolescents begin to rebel against social conventions and parental controls and also to act more sexually. Therefore it's difficult to distinguish the disorder from normal adolescent development.
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One good indication of the disorder is the recurrence of depressive episodes. In the movie Dirty Dancing we never see Baby suffering from depression. If we study the story's chronology, however, we can determine that the story has a blank gap from Sunday, August 11, through Saturday, August 17. On the evening of Sunday, August 18, Baby is walking alone through a woods. She sees Johnny Castle and follows him boldly. In order to continue following Johnny, Baby boldly grabs a watermelon out of Billy Kostecki's hands.
The fact that Baby was walking alone on that Sunday indicates that she has been generally alone during the previous days and perhaps has been suffering a depressive episode.
On Sunday evening, however, this alone young woman is acting quite boldly. The contrast between several days of depression and an evening of bold action indicates that the movie is showing her mood swing up into a manic episode, which will continue through the following days that we see in the movie,
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Although adolescents' behavior changes as they become more independent during their late teens, each individual maintains his or her normal personality. For example, an individual who was extroverted at age 13 will still be about as extroverted at age 19 -- or introverted or risky or careful or funny or serious or whatever other personality trait might be considered.
When an adolescent develops a mood disorder, however, there are episodes when that particular person's behavior goes outside his or her normal range.
Baby's normal behavior is sedentary, self-controlled and bookish. People who knew her for many years would be surprised to see her acting in the energetic, spontaneous and emotional manner that is displayed in the "Wipe Out" scene.
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Baby was perceived to be a reliably honest person, but in the following (largely deleted) scene, she acts uncharacteristically in a deceitful, manipulative manner.
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For me, however, the most important indication of Baby's mood disorder is her unethical behavior in her sexual seduction of Johnny Castle.
Adolescents rebelling normally will criticize, for example, their parents for supposedly being hypocrites. When Baby criticizes her father in the following scene, she is acting like a normal, bratty, nonsensical, 17-year-old girl who is rebelling from her father.
When she sexually seduced Johnny, however, she was potentially causing him a lot of trouble in order to enjoy personal benefits. Her reckless, selfish exploitation of Johnny was outside her normal character, which was to be thoughtful, ethical and self-sacrificing in relation to other people.
Whereas Baby's rebellion against her father was motivated largely by a normal drive to become independent from his parental control, she had no such need to cause turmoil in her relationship with Johnny, who intended to terminate his relationship with her after the Sheldrake performance.
Of course, Baby was motivated by her sexual desire for Johnny, but I nevertheless judge that the deceitfulness, recklessness and selfishness of her actions went far beyond her normal character.
Baby was in a manic phase from the evening of Sunday, August 18 (the watermelon scene), through the morning of Saturday, August 31 (the "Love is Strange" scene).
Then Baby was in a rather normal mood phase until the end of the movie.
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Sylvia Plath -- in her novel The Bell Jar -- described how she herself (the novel's heroine Esther Greenwood) had changed from a prim, scholarship-winning student into a sexually reckless, self-sabotaging fool during one summer of her late teens.
I speculate that Plath's personal life and novel interested Eleanor Bergstein from the early 1970s. Baby Houseman is not derived directly from Esther Greenwood, nor is Dirty Dancing derived directly from The Bell Jar. However, I think that Plath planted some literary seeds into Bergstein's mind.
Esther and Baby both are bookish young women -- about seventeen years old -- who go uncharacteristically crazy during a few summer weeks away from home. This is a story that is told often by many writers, but I think that Bergstein was influenced somewhat specifically by Plath.
In this post I will argue that Baby Houseman suffered from manic-depressive (aka bipolar) disorder, Type 2.
In the following video, Robin Mohilner describes her own first "full-blown manic episode", which occurred when she was 16 years old.
Mohilner was diagnosed as suffering from the disorder's Type 1, which is worse than Type 2.
Mohilner's Type 1 mania began with a Type 2 hypomania ("mild mania"), which she describes in the video's first 4:44 minutes. Mohilner lists the following symptoms of her initial Type 2 hypomania.
* Difficulty sleeping
* Increased sex drive
* Changed appetite
* Increased energy
* Agitation, especially with her family
* Obsession with a goal
* Racing thoughts
After describing her initial Type 2 hypomania -- after 4:44 on the video -- Mohilner describes her full-blown Type 1 mania.
I am not going to argue that Baby displays each of the hypomania symptoms listed above. Rather I am going to group all those symptoms into one general symptom that I call impulsiveness. Based on that general symptom, I now will diagnose Baby Houseman as suffering from manic-depressive disorder, Type 2, in the movie Dirty Dancing.
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During this article, I will refer occasionally to segments of the following video of scenes that were deleted from the movie.
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Baby is a Danger to Herself
The segment from 4:17 to 5:11 was supposed to begin the movie. The Houseman family is voting whether to go to the Catskills Mountains for their family vacation. Baby is the only family member who votes NO, and she is so angry that she breaks her pencil-point while writing her vote.
Baby is disagreeing vehemently with her family because she wants to go to Washington DC to participate in the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King will speak. The Houseman parents are afraid that Baby might be harmed at the event, and so they are taking her to the Catskills in order to prevent her trip. They fear that if Baby will be at their home in New York City, she will travel to Washington DC by bus or train, without their permission.
Although Baby usually has been an obedient and reliable child, the parents have been alarmed during the past year by Baby's episodes of disobedience and recklessness. Even if the March on Washington will be peaceful, Baby's personal recklessness might cause her harm.
So far, Baby's parents attribute her episodic impulsivity to her adolescence. After all, she is 17 years old, an age when a young woman naturally tries to assert her growing independence from her parents. Nevertheless, Baby's parents worry that without their constant supervision she might be in danger if she travels to Washington DC.
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Baby Is Going to Change the World
The Houseman parents observed that Baby was obsessed with a grandiose goal -- "changing the world". Both parents even joked to other people about Baby's obsession.
Marjorie Houseman
Look at all this leftover food. Are there still starving children in Europe?
Baby Houseman
Try Southeast Asia, Ma.
Marjorie Houseman
Right.
Jake Houseman (Addressing Robbie)
Robbie, Baby wants to send her leftover pot roast to Southeast Asia, so anything we don't finish, wrap up. (Addressing Max)
Max, our Baby's gonna change the world.
Max Kellerman (Addressing Lisa)
And what are you gonna do, Missy?
Baby Houseman
Lisa's gonna decorate it.
Although Baby jokes that her sister Lisa likewise has a grandiose goal, the entire Houseman family knows that Lisa's goals really are ordinary and modest. The one family member who is obsessed with unusual, grandiose goals is Baby.
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Baby Intends to Read a Lot of Books During Her Vacation
Baby has brought about a half-dozen books along on her vacation. These are serious books. For example, one of them is titled Plight of the Peasant.
The pile of books by Baby's bed
Samantha Adams, who suffers from manic-depressive disorder, Type 1, says that a person in a manic phase "will want to read ten books" at once (5:05 to 6:00 in the video).
Samantha suffered a Type 1 mania, whereas Baby suffered only Type 2 hypomania, but Baby's big pile of books is one of several indicators.
Manic Baby eating a breakfast platter instead of a grapefruit-half
The Every Day Health website has published an article, written by Dennis Thompson, Jr., and titled Eating Disorders and Bipolar Disorder, that includes the following passages (emphasis added):
Research has found that many people with bipolar disorder have eating issues like bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder. A recent study found one in five bipolar patients in its group of participants met the criteria for a lifetime eating disorder. ...
Binge eaters tend to compulsively overeat, but unlike bulimics, they do not purge afterward. They tend to feel shame or guilt over their eating and often eat by themselves and very quickly. Many bipolar patients report periods of binge eating, although whether they have a full-fledged disorder is not certain. Some medications for bipolar disorder promote binge eating.
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Baby Remains Alone for a Week
The Houseman family arrived at Kellerman's Mountain House on Saturday, August 10, 1963. That evening, Baby danced with Neil Kellerman in the ballroom. The next time Baby is seen is on Sunday, August 18, when she is walking alone through a woods. (See the segment from 0:00 to 0:55 in the above video of deleted scenes.)
A week has been skipped in the story. During that week, Baby has been involved with Neil Kellerman, but she has not socialized significantly with anyone else outside her family.
For several days during that skipped week Baby perhaps suffered a depressive phase of her manic-depressive disorder. That is why she is essentially alone after an entire week at the resort.
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Baby Chases After Johnny
By the evening of Sunday, August 18, Baby has passed completely through a depressive phase and has entered a hypomania phase. She has become impulsive. In particular, her sex drive has increased.
In the segment from 0:00 to 0:55 in the video of deleted scenes, Baby notices Johnny Castle engaged in some sexual activity with a woman in the woods. The sight arouses Baby sexually.
After Johnny parts from the woman and walks away, Baby follows him impulsively. She will follow him all the way to the area of the bunkhouse, where the "dirty dancing" party is taking place. When she sees Billy Kostecki carrying three watermelons, she will grab one of the watermelons as a tactic to continue following Johnny into the bunkhouse.
Baby will grab a watermelon from Billy
in order to continue following Johnny.
The Bipolar Lives website has published an article, written by Sarah Freeman and titled Bipolar infidelity, which includes the following passages:
The cause [of bipolar infidelity] is the hypersexuality, impaired judgement, poor impulse control, and grandiosity – scary bipolar symptoms – all brought on by mania. ... This behavior is a bipolar symptom and is also generally part of the mania – or the hypomania – infidelity is an issue for Bipolar Type I AND Bipolar Type 2. ...
A 1975 study that looked at lifetime sexual experience found extramarital sexual experiences to be more frequent amongst bipolar people – 29% had had 10 or more experiences.
According to figures quoted by Goodwin and Jamison, hypersexuality was reported in 57% of manic individuals, based on averages across seven studies, with a range of values from 25% to 80%!
A female reader of the article commented as follows:
Hello, I am recently diagnosed Bipolar Type 2 and I have struggled with bipolar infidelity ever since I was 18. I just couldn’t stop having sex with random people, many of whom I didn’t find attractive. I thought I was just going through my young years of hooking up. I was wrong.
When I entered my first relationship, I cheated. I did it with a smoker. How gross! I was honest and told my boyfriend. We broke up after because of that
Then, I entered another relationship and things were fine for about three months. And then I lost control and cheated again. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I figured it was just personal and a sign that he wasn’t my type. So I broke up with him.
Next, I entered a relationship with a really cute and caring guy. Again, about three months into it, I cheated. It was very frustrating. I broke up with him.
At this point, when friends asked me how many guys I’ve been with, I couldn’t give an honest answer. Should only be three, right? I really wanted it to be three. But it wasn’t -- it was over 100. I lost track. And so many of them were unwanted. I really just couldn’t control it.
When I graduated, I figured it was a sexual addiction. I chose to stay single to work on it. So I started taking steps to end that. But then I noticed that my sexual behavior was getting riskier. I was scared a few times of an STD.
But then I met a really great guy, who I am now with. I am worried because I am getting the urges again, and I really don’t want them. He knows I have Bipolar and we’re still in the relationship. I started taking a mood stabilizer from a psychiatrist, but I’m worried it’s not helping with the hypersexuality.
I don’t want this! So I made some appointments with a counselor to talk about everything. I really don’t want another relationship to end because I chose to cheat during a manic episode (although honestly it feels like I have no choice).
The following two videos done by Robin Mohilner provide superb descriptions of the manic phases of manic-depressive (aka bipolar) disorder. The second video focuses on the manic phases' effect on the person's romantic activities.
It is my passion as a therapist to provide resources and tools for people affected by bipolar disorder and other related disorders.
It’s been almost 20 years since I had my first bipolar full-blown mania and depression when I was diagnosed and began treatment. Since then, I graduated from UC Berkeley, achieved my Masters degree and earned my license as a Marriage and Family therapist in 2012.
I have worked intensively one-on-one with clients multiple times a week as a teacher of illness education and coping skills to people with mental illness and their loved ones. I was a coach of important principles and a mentor of how to fulfill needs. My hope is to help people get on their feet. ...
You should watch both videos before you read the rest of my post here.
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Eleanor Bergstein seems (to me) to portray in her works female characters who suffer from manic-depressive disorder, Type 2. Her works do not portray the depressive phases, but do portray the manic phases.
However, I still have not read Bergstein's 1973 novel Advancing Paul Newman, and I do not know enough about it to diagnose any of its characters.
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Bergstein wrote the screenplay for a movie titled It's My Turn, which was released in 1980. The movie's main character is a mathematics professor, Kate Gunzinger, who is trying to make major breakthrough in mathematics and who falls in love with a retired professional baseball player, Ben Lewin.
I have written blog twoarticles about the movie. There I called the movie "lousy". Afterwards I regretted using that word and began calling it "atrocious" instead.
Now, however, I think it's an excellent movie if it is understood to be a movie portraying a woman with the manic-depressive disorder.
The movie depicts Kate's trip from Chicago to New York for a few days. One purpose of the trip is to attend her widowed father's wedding to a new wife. During those few days, Kate's behavior is impulsive, reckless and risky.
After Kate returns to Chicago, she breaks up with her long-time boyfriend, who seems to be a very nice man. Kate cannot explain rationally to him the reason for her decision to break up.
After the breakup, Kate seems to be satisfied with her single life, because she feels free to devote herself to making a major breakthrough in mathematics in the near future.
This movie was marketed as portraying Kate as a feminist role model. I think that most men watching the movie would judge her behavior to be morally despicable, atrocious.
Although the movie starred Michael Douglas and Jill Clayburgh -- both of whom were big stars at the time -- the movie flopped at the box office. Douglas refused to promote the movie.
If you watch Mohilner videos about manic-depressive disorder and then watch Bergstein's movie It's My Turn, it will be obvious to you that the movie depicts mathematician Kate Gunzinger going through a manic phase during and right after her visit to New York.
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In this post here I am going to skip over the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing. I will devote a separate article to my argument that Baby Houseman seems to suffer from manic-depressive disorder, Type 2.
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Two years after Dirty Dancing was released, Bergstein's second novel, Ex-Lover, was published in 1989. I have not read the novel, but I have written a blog article that quotes extensively from three reviews of the novel. The novel's heroine, Jesse Gerard, is a 33-year-old playwright who is suffering depression following the recent deaths of her parents and of her best friend. The friend committed suicide.
To try to distract herself from her depression, Jesse is writing a magazine article about the making of a movie. Jesse is watching the filming of a scene where a stuntwoman is being pushed on a gurney. Jesse impulsively shoves the gurney over, and the stuntwoman is injured.
Although Jesse is happily married, she begins an affair the the movie's director of photography. She befriends the man's girlfriend in order to learn more about him.
Jesse befriends also the movie's leading actress, whose first name is Sylvie. Jesse feels that she and Sylvie are very similar -- that they even resemble each other physically.
A couple of the book reviews describe, as follows, Jesse's perception that she resembles the actress Sylvie.
In the past year, the cerebral Jesse has lost her mother, her father, and her best friend, so she plans to weave together a quirky, on-the-scene magazine piece ... She [Jessie] is an emotionally scarred survivor writing about a movie that is about a survivor ... [that] stars the notoriously superficial Sylvie. .... She [Jessie] also grows closer to Sylvie, seeing more and more similarities between the star and herself.
... and ...
An adulterous affair with the young director of photography moves Jesse into intimate connections with the crew and cast, including the movie's star, whom Jessie has always resembled.
The book reviews indicate to me that the character Jesse Gerard is a manic-depressive. Because she has been feeling depressed, she watches a movie being made. Then she begins a manic phase, in which she injures a stuntwoman, cheats on her husband with a director, befriends the director's girlfriend, and then decides that she herself is similar to an actress named Sylvie -- who has the same first name as Sylvia Plath. The actress plays a character who is depressed about her own mother.
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The third movie based on a Bergstein screenplay is Let It Be Me, which was released in 1987. I have analyzed that movie in an article in this blog. There I concluded: "I liked the movie and was delighted by many of its moments."
The movie's main character is 29-year-old Emily Taylor, a school teacher who is engaged to marry Gabriel Rudman, a psychiatrist. To prepare for their wedding dance, Emily and Gabriel take lessons at a dance studio. It turns out by coincidence that the studio is owned by Emily's high-school boyfriend, named Bud (his family name is not mentioned).
(In Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, the main character Esther Greenwood has an ex-boyfriend named Buddy Willard.)
When Emily was in high school, she got pregnant from Bud and got an abortion without ever informing him about her pregnancy.
Gabriel's belated discovery that Emily used to be Bud's boyfriend causes jealous arguments. Although Emily already has purchased her wedding dress and mailed all the wedding invitations, she breaks up with Gabriel and cancels the wedding. Later, however, Emily changes her mind and marries Gabriel after all.
Although I liked the movie Let It Be Me, I was bothered by some of Emily's actions, which in my article I called implausible. Now I would say instead that her actions were irrational or manic. If you want details, you can read my article about the move.
Bergstein also directed the movie -- in addition to writing the screenplay. After the movie was completed, she got into some mysterious argument with the producer. As a consequence, the producer made the movie disappear for many years. The movie was shown essentially in just one theater for one day. That was the end of Bergstein's career of writing and directing movies.
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It seems to me that Bergstein tends to write stories in which the heroines are manic-depressives, Type 2.
Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar was published in the United Kingdom in 1963 but was not published in the USA until 1971.
Eleanor Bergstein's first novel, Advancing Paul Newman, was published in 1973, so Bergstein probably finished writing the manuscript during 1972. So, in the early 1970s, Bergstein was beginning to develop the story for her second novel.
In the early 1970s, two books about Plath were published.
* The Savage God, by A. Alvarez, published in 1972, was a book about artists (primarily poets) who committed suicide, and much of the book was about Plath.
* Sylvia Plath, by Eileen Aird, published in 1973, was the first book-length biography of Plath.
In this series of posts, I have been speculating that in the early 1970s Bergstein, the wife of poet Michael Goldman, was influenced by these books by and about Plath as she began writing her second novel. Because Bergstein abandoned that novel to write the screenplay for the movie It's My Turn, released in 1980, I can only speculate about that second novel. The screenplay, perhaps derived from the abandoned novel, was about a female mathematics professor.
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The books by and about Plath provided several possible themes.
The experience and treatment of mental illness
Plath and her character Esther Greenwood suffered so much from mental illness -- manic-depressive disorder -- that they were hospitalized.
Suicide
Plath and Greenwood tried repeatedly to commit suicide. Plath's friend Alvzarez wrote a book about artists (primarily poets) being suicidal.
The struggles of poets and other writers
Extraordinarily talented writers (e.g. Plath and her husband Ted Hughes) are inadequately appreciated and paid for their hard, enterprising work.
The disadvantages of women in relation to men
Plath got stuck giving birth, raising children and providing emotional support while her husband was free to devote himself to writing and to having sexual affairs with other women.
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Sylvia Plath's mental illness was manic-depressive (aka bipolar) disorder. This disorder is classified into two types.
Type 1 is more severe and includes psychosis. (See my previous post's videos of Samantha Adams.)
Type 2 is less severe and does not include psychosis.
In my previous post, I provided a series of videos made by Samantha Adams, who has been diagnosed with Type 1 (she prefers the term manic-depressive to the term to bipolar).
Although Plath was suicidal and so was hospitalized for her disorder, she was not (as far as I know) psychotic, and so she seems to have suffered from Type 2.
The symptoms of Type 2 manic-depressive disorder have been summarized as follows:
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Several of Bergstein's heroines in her novels and screenplays seem to suffer from Type 2. I will explain this impression of mine in my following post, especially in regard to the character Baby Houseman in the movie Dirty Dancing.
My explanation will focus on those characters' hypomania phases. I will write relatively little about the depression phases. The following videos explain hypomania.
When Sylvia Plath went to New York City to work as an intern at Mademoiselle magazine in 1953, she squandered a great opportunity to begin a writing career. Before television became common, people read short stories. If a person had a half hour free, he might read a short story in a magazine. Practically every popular magazine, including Mademoiselle, featured a short story or two. Some writers earned good money by writing short stories and novellas.
After television became common, a person with a half hour free would watch a television show, and so short stories gradually disappeared from periodicals.
During that summer of 1953, Plath might have made contacts and learned some tricks of the trade useful for launching a writing career before she graduated from college. However, she squandered her summer internship, as she tells in her novel The Bell Jar.
Plath suffered from a manic-depressive order. During that summer, she apparently went through a manic phase.
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A young woman named Samantha Adams maintains a YouTube channel called rawsammi, where she talks about her manic-depressive disorder (she prefers that term to "bipolar disorder"), which is the most severe Type 1. (Type 2 is a milder disorder.) She describes herself as follows:
This is the personal YouTube channel of a socially anxious introvert who has been diagnosed with Bipolar 1 disorder. Welcome!
I talk about my experiences in life, answer viewer questions, and attempt to give occasional advice. I also make fun videos such as beauty, fashion, hauls, unboxing, gaming, and review videos. I am still figuring this YouTube thing out, so feel free to provide suggestions on content you would like to see or stuff you would like to know more about. I am 29-years-old and have university degrees in philosophy and public health.
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In the following video, she tells how she feels while she is in a manic phase.
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In the following video, she tells about writing while in a manic phase.
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In the following video, she tells about being hypersexual while in a manic phase.
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In the following video, she tells about her triggers for her manic and depressive phases.
Watch Adams' videos and then re-read The Bell Jar
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In the following video clip from the Sylvia movie, Sylvia Plath is talking with her poet friend (later the author of The Savage God) Al Alvarez in 1962. She recently has written -- probably in a somewhat manic phase -- her manuscript for her novel The Bell Jar, which she calls a potboiler. Now she wants to begin a sexual affair with someone (with Alvarez?).
Plath and Alvarez talk about past feelings of feeling suicidal.
After the scene with Alvarez, the following scenes show Plath sinking steadily into a depressive phase.
There is an ethnic aspect in this interaction, because the Housemans are Jewish and the artists are Gentiles, and that is part of the reason why the family patriarch Jake Houseman is concerned about his daughter Baby's romantic relationship with Johnny Castle. That aspect, however, is only a minor aspect.
The Houseman family conformed to the social conventions that worked well during the 1950s and early 1960s. The men attended universities and the developed professional careers. The women married and managed households that raised children to follow those conventions. Such families prospered.
Other characters in the movie followed the same conventions, although sometimes less than perfectly. Neil Kellerman attended a School of Hotel Management and was trying to find a suitable marriage partner. Robbie Gould attended Yale Medical School and dumped a girlfriend who turned out to be not suitable as a marriage partner.
The movie's major characters who failed to follow the social conventions were Johnny Castle and Penny Johnson, who were struggling to make their livings as professional dancers. Neither of them had obtained a higher education as their basis for developing their careers. Neither of them -- while already in their mid-twenties -- were orienting themselves toward marriage and children.
Johnny and Penny are artists who are struggling professionally and personally. Their economic futures seem bleak. Johnny might have to go back to painting and plastering houses. Penny suffered a close call with an unmarried pregnancy. Johnny and Penny feel intellectually inadequate and lack social self-confidence
The entanglements of Baby and Jake, on one hand, and Penny and Johnny, on the other hand, affect Baby and Jake profoundly. Baby and Jake come to appreciate and even respect Penny and Johnny.
I elaborated further about the status of artists in the USA in the early 1960s.
... the struggling artists -- musicians, dancers, writers and so forth -- made their livings by their wits and initiative -- not by earning college credentials. Artists always have struggled in society, but they enjoyed growing opportunities to succeed by the US economy of the early 1960s. Opportunities were developing in the businesses of movies, television, publishing, music, concerts, architecture, decoration and so forth. The artists' role and importance in American society was changing and growing.
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The movie's Houseman family was basically similar to the screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's family. Eleanor's father was a doctor, and Eleanor was the younger of two daughters. We can assume that Eleanor's mother was a housewife and that her older sister was conventionally feminine, similar to Lisa Houseman.
I speculate that Eleanor felt a special expectation that she should please her father by becoming, in some ways, the son whom her father never would raise. Perhaps, for example, Eleanor felt that she should follow in her father's footsteps by becoming a doctor. At least, Eleanor should establish a professional career so that her father would be able to to provide professional advice and guidance to her, as a father normally would provide to a son.
As Eleanor's life developed, however, she spent her young adulthood being a female dancer and then became a writer of stories for female audiences. In other words, she never became her father's son by establishing a professional career.
Rather, Eleanor became an artist -- a dancer and a writer. Furthermore, she married an artist -- a poet who made his living by teaching English. I am sure that Eleanor's parents would have been happier if she had brought home a serious boyfriend who was -- not an aspiring poet -- a medical student.
Although Eleanor's husband eventually became a professor at Princeton University, where he surely earned a good salary and benefits, she and he surely struggled for many years of their young adulthood because they decided to live mainly as artists.
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The following video clips from the movie Sylvia shows the poor living conditions of a couple of poets -- Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes -- at the early 1960s.
In these video clips, Plath and Hughes become acquainted with another couple of poets. The two couples try to become friends, but the attempt is spoiled by Sylvia's chronic jealously and resentment toward Ted.
Sylvia's manic-depressive order is aggravated by the hopeless economic poverty of her marriage.
Because of Ted's adultery, Sylvia separates from him, which will impoverish both of them even more.
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Before the invention of recorded music, good poets could earn relatively comfortable livings by writing poetry. Magazines and newspapers published poetry, and poetry books sold well. Poets toured and recited their poetry to paying audiences in concert halls.
Because the poems' ideas, rhythm and rhymes were clear, poems could be enjoyed without recorded music, which still did not exist.
Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven was treated like a number-one hit song is treated now. Poe went on tour and performed to paying audiences. Because writing poetry could be profitable, the poetry was superb. For example, Poe's popular poem The Raven captivates attention in its first stanza.
Once upon a midnight dreary,
While I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious
Volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping,
Suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping,
Rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered,
“Tapping at my chamber door —
Only this and nothing more.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow likewise earned a rather good living by writing and performing poetry. Because people paid for poetry, it was good; because it was good, people paid for it. Following is Longfellow's poem "The Children's Hour."
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the Children's Hour.
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.
A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.
A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!
They climb up into my turret
O'er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.
They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!
Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!
I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.
And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!
The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.
Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
======
After recorded music was invented, the poetic tradition continued for several decades. The lyrics continued to be good poetry, continuing the poetic cannon. The following video shows Ella Fitzgerald and The Inkspots singing the derivative song "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" in about 1944.
Into each life some rain must fall,
But too much is falling in mine.
Into each heart some tears must fall,
But some day the sun will shine.
Some folks can lose the blues in their hearts,
But when I think of you another shower starts.
Into each life some rain must fall,
But too much is falling in mine.
=====
By the early 1960s, however, when Plath and Hughes were trying to make their livings by writing poetry, that occupation no longer earned money, except for a very few people.
A rare example of someone who made money by writing and performing poetry was Rod McKuen, who sings his hit song "If You Go Away" in about 1965.
======
In 1963, the year when Sylvia Plath committed suicide, the year's top song was "Sugar Shack". Because poetry still had not become totally decadent, the song at least had rhythm and rhyme, but the lyrics were inane.
There's a crazy little shack beyond the tracks,
And everybody calls it the sugar shack.
Well, it's just a coffeehouse, and it's made out of wood.
Espresso coffee tastes mighty good.
That's not the reason why I've got to get back
To that sugar shack.
There's this cute little girlie, she's working there --
A black leotard and her feet are bare.
I'm gonna drink a lot of coffee, spend a little cash.
Make that girl love me when I put on some trash.
You can understand why I've got to get back
To that sugar shack.
Now that sugar-shack queen is married to me.
We just sit around and dream of those old memories.
But one of these days I'm gonna lay down tracks
In the direction of that sugar shack.
Just me and her, we're going to go back
To that sugar shack.
The lyrics could be inane doggerel, because they were merely a minor part of the whole, which was dominated by the instrumental music, the visual presentation, and the promotional marketing.
======
Ten years earlier, in 1953, Plath had traveled to New York City with hopes of beginning a career as a writer. She squandered that attempt and then suffered a mental breakdown.
Plath's writing career did not get restarted until she moved to England and met Hughes in 1956. Then they decided that they would try to make their living together by writing poetry.
At the end of Part 2, I reported that Jonathan Bate, a preeminent scholar of English literature, calls Ted Hughes "one of the two or three greatest poets of the Twentieth Century".
Sylvia Plath, herself an excellent poet, recognized that she never would be able to keep pace with her husband Ted's achievements in poetry.
One of Hughes' greatest achievements was his book Tales From Ovid, published in 1997. The book provides a poetic paraphrase translation of many poems from the Latin poet Ovid's major work Metamorphoses. Ovid's work is the source of many mythological stories that have become famous in the literature of Western Civilization.
Soon after the book was published, I noticed it in the New Books section of my local library. It intended to just browse through it, but I found myself reading, with continual delight, all 250 pages. Later I bought a copy but have not reread it until now.
So that my readers will appreciate Hughes' poetic talent, I will provide here some excerpts from his Tales from Ovid.
======
Creation; Four Ages; Lycaon; Flood
Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed
into different bodies.
I summon the supernatural beings
Who first contrived
The transmorgrifications
In the stuff of life.
You did it for your own amusement.
Descend again, be pleased to reanimate
This revival of those marvels.
Reveal, now, exactly
How they were performed
From the beginning
Up to his moment.
Before sea or land, before even sky
Which contains all,
Nature wore only one mask --
Since called Chaos.
A huge agglomeration of upset.
A bolus of everything -- but
As if aborted.
And the total arsenal of entropy
Already at war within it.
No sun showed one thing to another,
No moon
Played her phases in heaven,
No earth
Spun in empty air on her own magnet,
No ocean
Basked or roamed on the long beaches.
Land, sea, air, were all there
But not to be trodden, or swum in.
Air was simply darkness.
Everything fluid or vapour, form formless.
Each thing hostile
To every other thing: at every point
Hot fought cold, most dry, soft hard, and the weightless
Resisted weight.
God, or some such artist as resourceful,
Began to sort it out.
Land her, sky there,
And sea there.
Up there, the heavenly stratosphere.
Down her, the cloudy, the windy.
He gave to each its place,
Independent, gazing about freshly.
Also resonating --
Each one a harmonic of the others,
Just like the strings
That would resound, one day, in the dome of the tortoise.
[continues]
======
Tiresias
One time, Jupiter, happy to be idle,
Swept the cosmic mystery aside
And draining another goblet of ambrosia
Teased Juno, who drowsed in bliss beside him:
"This love of male and female's a strange business.
Fifty-fifty investment in the madness,
Yet she ends up with nine-tenths of the pleasure."
Juno's answer was: "A man might think so.
It needs more than a mushroom in your cup
To wake a wisdom that can fathom which
Enjoys the deeper pleasure, man or woman.
It needs the solid knowledge of a soul
Who having lived and loved in woman's body
Has also lived and loved in the body of a man."
Jupiter laughed aloud: "We have the answer.
There is a fellow called Tiresias.
Strolling to watch the birds and hear the bees
He came across two serpents copulating.
He took the opportunity to kill
Both with a single blow, but merely hurt them --
And found himself transformed into a woman.
"After the seventh year of womanhood,
Strolling to ponder on what women ponder
She saw in that same place the same two serpents
Knotted as before in copulation.
"If your pain can still change your attacker
Just as you once changed me, then change me back."
She hit the couple with a handy stick,
"And there he stood as male as any man."
"He'll explain," cried Juno, "why you are
Slave to your irresistible addiction
While the poor nymphs you force to share it with you
Do all they can to shun it." Jupiter
Asked Tiresias: "In their act of love
Who takes the greater pleasure, man or woman?"
"Woman," replied Tiresias, "takes nine-tenths."
Juno was so angry -- angrier
Than is easily understandable --
She struck Tiresias and blinded him.
"You've seen your last pretty snake, for ever."
But Jove consoled him: "That same blow," he said,
"Has opened your inner eye, like a nightscope. See:
"The secrets of the future -- they are yours."
======
Echo and Narcissus
When the prophetic vision awoke
Behind the blind eyes of Tiresias
And stared into the future,
The first to test how deeply he saw
And how lucidly
Was Liriope, a swarthy nymph of the fountain.
She was swept off her feet by the river Cephisus
Who rolled her into the bed of a dark pool,
Then cast her up on the shingle pregnant.
The boy she bore, even in his cradle,
Had a beauty that broke hearts.
She named this child Narcissus. Gossips
Came to Tiresias: "Can her boy live long
With such perfect beauty?" The seer replied:
"Yes, unless he learns to know himself."
[....]
In his sixteenth year Narcissus,
Still a slender boy but already a man,
Infatuated many. His beauty had flowered,
But something glassy about it, a pride,
Kept all his admirers at a distance.
None dared be familiar, let alone touch him.
[....]
One of these [nymphs], mocked and rejected,
Lifted his hands to heaven:
"Let Narcissus love and suffer
As he has made us suffer.
Let him, like us, love and know it is hopeless.
And let him, like Echo, perish of anguish." Nemesis, the corrector,
Heard this prayer and granted it.
There is a pool of prefect water.
No shepherd had ever driven sheep
To trample the margins. No cattle
Had slobbered there muzzles in it
And befouled it.
No bird had ever paddled there preening and bathing.
Only surrounding grasses drank its moisture
And though the arching trees kept it cool
No twigs rotted in it, and no leaves.
Weary with hunting and the hot sun
Narcissus found this pool.
Gratefully he stretched out full length
To cup his hands in the clear cold
And to drink. But as he drank
A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar,
Entered his body with the water,
And entered his eyes
With the reflection in the limpid mirror.
He cold not believe the beauty
Of those eyes that gazed into his own.
As the taste of water flooded him
So did love. So he lay, mistaking
That picture of himself on the meniscus
For the stranger who could make him happy.
He lay, like a fallen garden statue,
Gaze fixed on his image in the water,
Comparing it to Bacchus or Apollo,
Falling deeper and deeper in love
With what so many had loved so hopelessly.
Not recognizing himself
He wanted only himself. He had chosen
From all the faces he had ever seen
Only his own. He was himself
The torturer who now began his torture.
[continues]
======
Midas
[....]
Midas said: "Here is my wish.
Let whatever I touch become gold.
Yes, gold, the finest, the purest, the brightest."
Bacchus gazed at the King and sighed gently.
He felt pity --
Yet his curiosity was intrigued
To see how such stupidity would be punished.
So he granted the wish, then stood back to watch.
The Phrigian King returned through the garden
Eager to test the power -- yet apprehensive
That he had merely dreamed and now was awake,
Where alchemy never works. He broke a twig
From a low branch of oak. The leaves
Turned to heavy gold as he stared at them
And his mouth went dry.
[....]
He fell on his bed, ace down, eyes closed
From the golden heavy fold of his pillow.
He prayed
To the god who had given him the gift
To take it back. "I have been a fool.
Forgive me, Bacchus. Forgive the greed
That made me so stupid.
Forgive me for a dream
That had not touched the world
Where gold is gold and nothing but.
Save me from my own shallowness,
Where I shall drown in gold
And be buried in gold.
Nothing can live, I see, in a world of gold."
Bacchus, too, had had enough.
His kindliness came uppermost easily.
"I return you," said the god,
"To your happier human limitations ...
[....]
Midas never got over the shock.
The sight of gold was like the thought of a bee
To one just badly stung --
It made his hair prickle, his nerves tingle.
He retired to the mountain woods
And a life of deliberate poverty. There
He worshiped Pan, who lives in the mountain caves.
King Midas was chastened
But not really changed. He was not wiser.
His stupidity
Was merely lying low. Waiting, as usual,
For another chance to ruin his life.
[....]
Pan lives in a high cave on that cliff.
He was amusing himself,
Showing off to the nymphs,
Thrilling them out of their airy bodies
With the wild airs
He breathed through the reeds of his flute.
Their ecstasies flattered him,
Their words, their exclamations, flattered him.
But the flattered
Become fools. And when he assured them
That Apollo, no less,
Stole his tunes and rearranged his rhythms
It was a shock
For Pan
to find himself staring at the great god
Hanging there in the air off the cave mouth,
Half eclipsed with black rage,
Half beaming with a friendly challenge.
"Tmolus, the mountain," suggested the god, "can judge us."
Tmolus shook out his hair,
Freed his ears of bushes, trees, birds, insects,
Then took his place at the seat of judgment,
Binding his wig with a whole oak tree --
The acorns clustering over his eyebrows,
And announced to Pan: "Your music first."
It so happened
Midas was within hearing
Collecting nuts and berries. Suddenly he heard
Music that froze him immobile
As long as it lasted. He did not know
What happened to him as Pan's piping
Carried him off --
Filled him with precipices,
Lifted him on weathered summits,
Poured blue icy rivers through him,
Hung him from the stars,
Replaced him
With the flourescent earth
Spinning and dancing on the jet of a fountain.
[.... Apollo plays music, favored by Tmolus ...]
Pan was humbled. Yes, he agreed --
Apollo was the master. Tmolus was correct.
The nymphs gazed at Apollo. They agreed.
But then a petulant voice,
A hard-angled, indignant differing voice
Came from behind a rock.
Midas stood up. "The judgement," he cried,
"Is ignorant, stupid, and merely favours power.
Apollo's efforts
Are nothing but interior decoration
By artificial light, for the chic, the effete.
Pan is the real thing -- the true voice
Of the subatomic.
Apollo's face seemed to writhe
Momentarily
As he converted this clown's darkness to light,
Then pointed his plectrum at the ears
That had misheard so grievously.
Abruptly those ears lolled long and animal,
On either side of Midas' impertinent face.
Revolving at the root, grey-whiskered, bristly,
The familiar ears of a big ass.
The King,
Feeling the change, grabbed to hang on to his ears,
Then he had some seconds of pure terror
Waiting for the rest of his body to follow.
But the ears used up the power of the plectrum.
This was the god's decision. The King
Lived on, human, wagging the ears of a donkey.
[continues]
======
In the mid-1990s Hughes -- as the salaried Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom -- was trying, successfully, to popularize poetry among his country's people. With his translation of Ovid -- paraphrased into simple, casual English -- he introduced or re-introduced many English readers to a poetic, fundamental masterpiece of Western Civilization.
Hughes devoted his entire life to inspiring English-readers with poetry. He was able to do so -- for many years in his early career -- because he had a supportive, poetic wife, Sylvia Plath.
======
In the following video clip from the movie Sylvia, the character who enters at 3:50 is A. Alvarez, the poet who after Plath's suicide would write the book The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, published in 1972.
I think that it's likely that Eleanor Bergstein and her husband, poet Michael Goldman, read The Savage God soon after it was published.
This all is my mere speculation. I do not know whether Eleanor Bergstein ever read anything by or about Sylvia Plath.
=====
Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar was published in the United Kingdom in 1963 but was not published in the USA until 1971.
Bergstein's first novel, Advancing Paul Newman, was published in 1973, so Bergstein probably finished writing the manuscript during 1972. So, in the early 1970s, Bergstein was beginning to develop the story for her second novel.
In the early 1970s, two books about Plath were published.
-----
The Savage God, by A. Alvarez, published in 1972, was a book about artists who committed suicide, and much of the book was about Plath.
"The Savage God", by A. Alvarez, 1972
-----
Sylvia Plath, by Eileen Aird, published in 1973, was the first book-length biography of Plath.
"Sylvia Plath", by Eileen Aird, published in 1973
-----
The Savage God, by Alvarez -- an English poet, novelist and literary critic -- was especially influential. Alvarez was a close friend of Plath and of her husband Ted Hughes. Alvarez himself was a suicidal poet. A book review by essayist James H. Brown about The Savage God included the following passages:
.... Alvarez is a distinguished English poet, literary critic and author. The book is very well written and displays an easy mastery of the relevant literary and historical scholarship. It is a gripping work, and deserves to be read and reread simply for its fund of information and insight, and the skill with which they are presented. ... He seems to be looking ... for a metaphysical (or perhaps literary) answer to the problem of suicide, and before the end of the volume he sketches a theory about suicide in poets.
The book consists of a prologue, which is an account of the author's personal acquaintance with the poet Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes, during the period leading up to Sylvia Plath's suicide; a review of some historical attitudes to suicide; a review of some of the current psychological, sociological and other data and theories on suicide (some of this unduly dismissive); a review of suicide and literature, particularly English poetry, concluding with a discussion of the "extremist" modem English poets (e.g. Lowell, Berryman, Hughes and Plath); and an epilogue,
which is a description of the author's own suicidal attempt.
The largest, most coherent arid most luminous of these parts is the review of suicide and literature. At the conclusion of this the author, relying heavily on his brief accounts of Sylvia Plath and of the "extremist" poets, puts forward his view that this difficult poetic style is so demanding that it carries unusual psychic
risks for its practitioners. ...
Alvarez's description of his own suicidal attempt, in contrast with his description of Sylvia Plath's suicide, makes no attempt to derive the episode from his life as a poet and writer. He speculates briefly about intrapsychic problems stemming from early childhood; refers elliptically to current personal and marital problems; and then describes a descent into a state of profound depression complicated by alcoholic excess, with increasingly frequent suicidal preoccupation and planning, culminating in an overdose of sleeping pills taken during an alcoholic blackout on Christmas Day.
His life was seriously endangered. The crisis was apparently followed by complete and rapid recovery, so that by New Year's Day he was free of depressive symptoms and suicidal preoccupations alike.
In April 1972 The New York Times printed a long excerpt about Plath's suicide.
Why, then, did she kill herself? In part, I suppose, it was "a cry for help" which fatally misfired. But it was also a last desperate attempt to exorcise the death she had summed up in her poems.
I have already suggested that perhaps she had begun to write obsessively about death for two reasons.
First, when she and her husband separated, however mutual the arrangement, she again went through the same piercing grief and bereavement she had felt as a child when her father, by his death, seemed to abandon her.
Second, I believe she thought her car crash the previous summer had set her free; she had paid her dues, qualified as a survivor and could now write about it.
But as I have written elsewhere, for the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expression may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him.
The result of handling it in his work may well be that he finds himself living it out. For the artist, in short, nature often imitates art. Or, to change the clichè, when an artist holds up a mirror to nature he finds out who and what he is; but the knowledge may change him irredeemably so that he becomes that image.
I think Sylvia, in one way or another, sensed this. In an introductory note she wrote to "Daddy" for the B.B.C., she said of the poem's narrator, "She has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it." The allegory in question was, as she saw it, the struggle in her between a fantasy Nazi father and a Jewish mother. But perhaps it was also a fantasy of containing in herself her own dead father, like a woman possessed by a demon (in the poem she actually calls him a vampire). In order for her to be free from him, he had to be released like a genie from a bottle.
And this is precisely what the poems did; they bodied forth the death within her. But they also did so in an intensely living and creative way. The more she wrote about death, the stronger and more fertile her imaginative world became. And this gave her everything to live for.
I suspect that in the end she wanted to have done with the theme once and for all. But the only way she could find was "to act out the awful little allegory once over."
She had always been a bit of a gambler, used to taking risks. The authority of her poetry was in part due to her brave persistence in following the thread of her inspiration right down to the Minotaur's lair. And this psychic courage had its parallel in her physical arrogance and carelessness. Risks didn't fright her; on the contrary, she found them stimulating. Freud has written: "Life loses in interest when the highest stake in the games of living, life itself, may not be risked." Finally, Sylvia took that risk. She gambled for the last time, having worked out that the odds were in her favor, but perhaps, in her depression, not much caring whether she won or lost. Her calculations went wrong and she lost.
It was a mistake, then, and out of it a whole myth has grown. I don't think she would have found it much to her taste, since it is a myth of the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art, having been dragged by the Muses of that final altar through every kind of distress. In these terms, her suicide becomes the whole point of the story, the act which validates her poems, given them their interest and proves her seriousness.
So people are drawn to her work in much the same spirit as Time magazine featured her at length: not for the poetry but for the gossipy, extra-literary "human interest." Yet just as the suicide adds nothing at all to the poetry, so the myth of Sylvia as a passive victim is a total perversion of the woman she was. It misses altogether her liveliness, her intellectual appetite and harsh wit, her great imaginative resourcefulness and vehemence of feeling, her control.
Above all, it misses the courage with which she was able to turn disaster into art. The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath, but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake and too soon.
======
It's very likely that Eleanor Bergstein -- the wife of poet Michael Goldman, a professor of English at Princeton University -- was very interested by the publication of The Bell Jar and of these books about Plath in the early 1970s, when Bergstein was developing the story for her second novel.
Of course, in the early 1970s Plath was only one of many feminist writers who interested and influenced people. I speculate, however, that the tragic story of the Plath-Hughes marriage especially touched Bergstein, a female writer married to a male writer.
======
Bergstein's second novel, which she was writing during the mid-1970s, never has been published, so I can only speculate about its story. In my previous post in this series, I speculated that the story was about the relationship between a female mathematics professor and a male mathematics professor. This relationship might have corresponded roughly to novelist Bergstein's own relationship with her poet husband, a university professor.
Bergstein wrote about mathematics professors (I speculated) because Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Plath's novel The Bell Jar, gave her virginity to a man named Irwin, a mathematics professor at Harvard University. Perhaps Bergstein's second novel somewhat imagined that Esther eventually became a mathematician and continued her relationship with Irwin.
After Bergstein abandoned this novel, she wrote the screenplay for the movie It's My Turn, released in 1980, about a female mathematics professor and a retired professional baseball player. I speculate that Bergstein converted her novel's male mathematics professor into the movie's baseball player in order to broaden her story's appeal.
======
No matter whether Bergstein's second novel was about a couple of mathematics professors.
Between Bergstein's 1973 novel, Advancing Paul Newman, and her 1980 movie, It's My Turn, her focus shifted from a female-female conflict to a female-male conflict.
In Advancing Paul Newman, the conflict is between two young women -- Kitsy Frank and Ilia Rappaport. Kitsy get married to a professionally successful man and becomes a housewife and mother. In contrast, Ilia has an endless series of brief affairs and struggles to earn a living as a free-lance photographer.
In It's My Turn, the conflict is between a woman and a man -- Kate Gunzinger and Ben Lewin. Kate aspires to make a major breakthrough in mathematics. Ben had to retire as a professional athlete because of a shoulder injury and now he is trying to start a new career as an inspirational speaker.
The conflict in It's My Turn is that Kate is troubled by feelings of inferiority and insecurity in relation to men whereas Ben feels blithely confident and aggressive in relation to women. Kate is seduced easily by Ben, despite various circumstances that should have inhibited her from succumbing sexually to him.
It's My Turn is a lousy movie, but it provides some insight into Bergstein's concerns as a writer during the mid-1970s. Bergstein loved and admired men (especially her father), but she resented the sexual and social realities that enabled men to excel professionally over women and to enjoy relatively satisfactory lives.
The battle of the sexes was not fair!
======
Sylvia Plath (born in 1932) was only about two years younger than Ted Hughes (born in 1938), but she was clearly subordinate to him in their relationship. His reputation as a poet was better, and he earned an income as a professional writer for BBC. She got stuck at home, giving birth and raising babies.
In the following video clip from the movie Sylvia, she expresses her anxiety and resentment in relation to him, as he lectures to her about how she should improve herself as a poet.
The following video shows more excerpts from the movie.
======
The following video shows Jonathan Bate, a preeminent scholar of English literature, talking about a biography he wrote, The Unauthorized Life of Ted Hughes. In the video, Bates calls Hughes "one of the two or three greatest poets of the Twentieth Century".
======
The following video shows a lecture about the Plath-Hughes poetry-writing collaboration, titled "Poetry and Co-dependency: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath", read by Professor Belinda Jack, a teacher at Oxford University.
Eleanor Bergstein, the screenwriter of the movie Dirty Dancing, was born in 1938, about six years after the birth in 1932 of Sylvia Plath, the author of the novel The Bell Jar.
Plath's novel was published in the United Kingdom on January 14, 1963. Plath -- the mother of two young children -- committed suicide about a month later, on February 11, 1963.
Sylvia Plath in 1963, a short time before she committed suicide
Almost exactly six months after Plath's suicide, the Houseman family in Bergstein's movie arrived at Kellerman's Mountain House.
Although The Bell Jar was published in the UK in 1963, it was not published in the USA until 1971.
Bergstein's first novel, Advancing Paul Newman, was published in 1973, so Bergstein probably finished writing the manuscript during 1972. I speculate that soon after Bergstein finished her manuscript, she read The Bell Jar and was significantly influenced by it as she thought about writing her own next novel.
======
I have no direct evidence that Bergstein ever read The Bell Jar. My speculation is based on only a few, scattered bits of evidence and on my deductive reasoning.
I might be compared to a paleontologist constructing an entire dinosaur's appearance from just a few teeth and bones.
My collection of evidence
All my evidence
My construction from my evidence
=====
Bergstein and Plath both were writers who were married to talented poets.
* Bergstein is married to Michael Goldman, a poet who enjoyed a career of teaching English at Princeton University. (I do not know when they married, when he began to teach at Princeton or whether they have children.)
* Plath was married to Ted Hughes, a poet. In the early 1960s he was employed as a writer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. In later years he made his living by writing and publishing poetry. In 1984 he became the UK's poet laureate, which was a paid position. He inherited Plath's copyright to The Bell Jar -- more than three million copies of which have been sold.
Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and their child
======
Compare the following passages from the beginnings of The Bell Jar and of Dirty Dancing.
It was a queer, sultry summer -- the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs -- and I didn't know what I was doing in New York City.
... and ...
That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me "Baby", and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot. ... That was the summer we went to Kellerman's.
The Rosenbergs in the Plath's passage were a couple of Jewish-Americans who had been convicted for espionage and were executed on June 11, 1953.
Both passages, with similar structures and cadences, set the stories in the summertime, shortly before sensational political killings. The killings were famous enough that people reading The Bell Jar in 1963 immediately placed the novel's story in the year 1953, just as people watching Dirty Dancing in 1987 immediately placed the movie's story in the year 1963.
The Plath passage is spoken at 1:00 in the following trailer for a movie adaption of The Bell Jar.
======
The Bell Jar is about a young woman, Esther Greenwood, who wants to become a writer. In the summer of 1953 she has just finished her junior year at Smith College, a woman's college in Massachusetts. Smith College is about about 20 miles from Mount Holyoke College, which Baby Houseman would begin to attend after her eventful summer of 1963.
Esther has a boyfriend, Buddy Willard, who is a pre-med student at Yale University (just like Robby Gould) and who has a sexual affair with a waitress. Esther gets revenge on Buddy by giving her own virginity to a Harvard mathematics professor named Irwin.
======
After Bergstein' novel Advancing Paul Newman was published in 1973, a movie director named Claudia Weill who liked the novel asked Bergstein to write a screenplay. For several years, Bergstein turned down Weill's requests, saying she was too busy writing her second novel. Eventually in about 1977, however, Bergstein relented and agreed to write a screenplay. In an earlier post, I quoted from a magazine article that had reported about the Bergstein-Weill collaboration.
... [in 1973], Claudia Weill, who was making documentaries, read a political novel called Advancing Paul Newman, which was about two girls in the Sixties. Weill contacted the author, Eleanor Bergstein, and asked if she would like to write a screenplay .... Bergstein, who had started her second novel, wasn't interested.
"Eleanor is a knockout writer," says Weill .... I bugged Eleanor for years." ....
Weill called Bergstein [in about 1977] and told her about a project that she thought would fulfill her [Bergstein's] conditions. There would be a one-in-three chance of production, a $200,000 grant if produced, the work would be shown on educational television, and there might be a limited theatrical release. .... Bergstein had finished a draft of her [second] novel ....
Bergstein and Weill sat down to discuss what they could do with $200,000 in terms of setups and locations. Then Bergstein and her husband, Michael Goldman (an author and professor of Shakespeare, modern drama and poetry at Princeton), leased a house in Vermont, and she went to work.
Although the above passage mentions that Bergstein "had finished a draft of her [second] novel", that novel never has been published.
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I speculate that Bergstein's never-published novel was about a love affair between two mathematics professors at a university. After working on this novel for several years, Bergstein realized that this novel never would interest any publishers, and so she gave up.
However (I speculate), Bergstein did use some elements of her abandoned novel in the screenplay she wrote for Weill. Eventually the screenplay became the movie It's My Turn, which was released in 1980.
This movie's main female character, Kate Gunzinger, is a mathematics professor at a university. The movie's main male character is Ben Lewin, a retired professional baseball player, but I speculate that the novel's main character was likewise a mathematics professor.
Kate is an unusual woman trying to make a career in the male-dominated academic field of mathematics. She apparently fears that women are naturally inferior in advanced mathematics. The following scene shows Kate apparently being corrected and surpassed by one of her male students.
In the above-quoted article about he Bergstein-Weill collaboration, Bergstein her interest in mathematicians who succeeded in making important advances in mathematics.
I thought about mathematicians and how most of them, from Einstein on down, do their best work and have their major breakthroughs in their early twenties, or certainly before the age of thirty. They can go on to do good work, but it is usually based on that original insight."
The movie character Kate aspires not merely to teach mathematics to university students, but rather to make a major breakthrough in mathematics in competition with her fellow professional mathematicians. Despite such a lofty ambition, however, she fears that she was hired by the university because she is a female token whose mere presence can help the university satisfy the affirmative-action requirements imposed by the government.
In Bergstein's abandoned novel (I speculate), the mathematics professor Kate had a competitive relationship with a male mathematics professor, and this relationship developed into a love affair. In the movie, Kate has a competitive relationship with a retired professional baseball player, and this relationship develops into a love affair.
An important part of Bergstein's story about a female-male competitive relationship is that the females suffer various disadvantages. Women spend much of their time and energy raising children, maintaining the family households and providing emotional support to their husbands. It's no wonder that men succeed professionally far more than women do.
It's not fair!
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Why did Bergstein waste years of her life writing a dopey novel about a love affair between a couple of mathematics professors? I speculate that she did so for the following reasons:
In her own life, Bergstein was an aspiring writer married to a talented poet, and she resented that his writing accomplishments eventually would excel hers by far.
Bergstein compared 1) her own resentful relationship with her own poet husband Goldman and 2) Plath's tragic relationship with her poet husband Hughes. Plath's writing career was impeded by her having to raise two children and serve her husband, while Hughes was rather free to spend his time and energy on his writing.
In The Bell Jar, Esther is infatuated briefly with a Harvard mathematics professor so much that she surrenders her virginity to him. She does not save her virginity for her long-time boyfriend, the pre-med student at Yale.
Instead of writing her novel about a couple of competing poets, she was inspired by The Bell Jar to write instead about a couple of mathematicians.
So, that is my speculation about the novel that Bergstein abandoned right before she wrote the screenplay for It's My Turn.
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An important and repeated theme in Bergstein's body of works is that women are disadvantaged in competing with men because women get stuck raising children, maintaining the family households and providing emotional support to their husbands. That's a big reason why the right to abort pregnancies is so important to Bergstein.
Because Bergstein felt strongly about those issues, she would have been affected emotionally by the Bell Jar character Esther's fear of becoming pregnant. The novel's Chapter 6, which focuses on Esther's apprehensions about sex and childbirth, is summarized by the SparkNotes website as follows:
Esther continues to remember the progression of her relationship with Buddy. She went to visit him at Yale Medical School, and since she had been asking to see interesting sights at the hospital, he showed her cadavers and fetuses in jars, which she viewed calmly.
They attended a lecture on diseases, and then went to see a baby being born. Buddy and his friend Will joked that Esther should not watch the birth, or she would never want to have a baby. Buddy told her that the woman had been given a drug, and would not remember her pain. Esther thought the drug sounded exactly like something invented by a man. She hated the idea that the drug tricks the woman into forgetting her pain. The woman had to be cut in order to free the baby, and the sight of the blood and the birth upset Esther, although she said nothing to Buddy.
After the birth, they went to Buddy’s room, where Buddy asked Esther if she had ever seen a naked man. She said no, and he asked if she would like to see him naked. She agreed, and he took off his pants. The sight of him naked made her think of “turkey neck and turkey gizzards,” and she felt depressed.
She refused to let him see her naked, and then asked him if he had ever slept with a woman, expecting him to say that he was saving himself for marriage. He confessed to sleeping with a waitress named Gladys at a summer job in Cape Cod. He claimed she seduced him, and admitted that they slept together for ten weeks.
Esther was not bothered by the idea that Buddy slept with someone, but was angry that he hypocritically presented himself as virginal and innocent. Esther asked students at her college what they would think if a boy they had been dating confessed to sleeping with someone, and they said a woman could not be angry unless she were pinned or engaged.
When she asked Buddy what his mother thought of the affair, Buddy said he told his mother, “Gladys was free, white, and twenty-one.”
Esther decided to break up with Buddy ....
Here Esther experiences a lot of resentment about the advantages that males enjoy over women, who have to remain virgins until marriage, have to sexually submit their own beautiful female bodies to physically repulsive male bodies, and have to give birth afterwards. It's not fair!
Later, in the novel's Chapter 18, Esther decides to even the field somewhat in her own personal battle between the sexes.
Esther had told Dr. Nolan [a woman] that she wants the kind of freedom that men have, but she feels that the threat of pregnancy hangs over her. Esther told Dr. Nolan about the pamphlet on chastity her mother sent her, and Dr. Nolan laughed, called it propaganda, and gave her the name of a doctor who would help her.
Esther goes to the doctor to get fitted for a diaphragm. In the waiting room, she observes the women with babies and wonders at her own lack of maternal instinct. The doctor is cheerfully unobtrusive, and as he fits her Esther thinks delightedly that she is gaining freedom from fear and freedom from marrying the wrong person. Her birth control acquired, Esther wants to find the right man with whom to lose her virginity. ....
Esther continues to sort out her feelings about men, recognizing the truth of what Dr. Nolan says: many women lack tenderness in their relationships with men. Esther continues to feel she needs to lose her virginity in order to mark her rejection of the conventional expectation that she will remain “pure” for her husband.
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For various reasons, The Bell Jar was a novel that surely would have interested Bergstein. It's likely that she read the novel soon after it was published in the USA in 1971. The novel was written by an aspiring female writer, like Bergstein herself, who was married to a talented poet. Bergstein's reading of The Bell Jar would have influenced her as she was writing her second novel during the mid-1970s.
Bergstein's second novel never has been published, but we can speculate that important elements of that unpublished novel were included in the subsequent screenplay that she wrote for the movie It's My Turn, which was released in 1980.
I cannot prove that Bergstein ever read The Bell Jar, but a few of that novel's details resonate with Dirty Dancing.
* The passages setting each story in the summer, before a sensational political killing.
* The main female characters attend all-women colleges in Massachusetts.
* The pre-med students -- Buddy and Robbie -- attending Yale university and enjoying pre-marital sex.
* In the novel, the pre-med student has sex with a waitress during a summer. In the movie, he is a summertime waiter.
More generally, Plath and Bergstein share a strong resentment toward the disadvantages that a female writer suffers in a relationship with a writer husband -- more particularly toward a husband who is a talented poet.
Being a poet is a rarified occupation in which only a very few people can earn respect, fame and a decent income. In that regard, poets are similar to mathematicians.
In theory, women should be able to compete well against men in the fields of poetry and mathematics, but in fact, men rise overwhelmingly to the very tops of those two professions. Women's resentment about their sexual disadvantages in competing against men professionally is a major theme in the works of both Plath and Bergstein.
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One of Plath's poems, titled The Death of Myth-Making, expresses her resentment that a man (a steed) enjoys various advantages over a woman (a nag) enjoys in the occupation of writing poems (myth-making).
Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag,
To grind our knives and scissors:
Lantern-jaw Reason, squat Common Sense.
One courting doctors of all sorts,
One, housewives and shopkeepers.
The trees are lopped, the poodles trim,
The laborer's nails pared level
Since those two civil servants set
Their whetstone to the blunted edge
And minced the muddling devil
Whose owl-eyes are in the scraggly wood
Scared mothers to miscarry,
Drove the dogs to cringe and whine,
And turned the farmboy's temper wolfish,
The housewife's desultory.
I interpret Plath's poem as follows.
The accomplishment (virtue) achieved by the male (stallion) poet surpasses the accomplishment (virtue) accomplished by the female (nag) poet.
The male poet sharpens large knives, whereas the female poet sharpens small scissors.
A lantern-jaw man write poems full of Reason, whereas a squat woman writes poems full of mere Common Sense.
The male poet influences doctors and other intellectuals, whereas a female poet influences mere housewives and shopkeepers.
A man cuts down trees, whereas a woman merely trims poodles' hair.
The male poet uses his big, sharpened knife and the female poet uses her small sharpened scissors to attack life's evil (the muddling devil). The female poet is further weakened, however, by her anxious pregnancies. A female poet is timid, like a fearful dog.
In contrast, a male facing danger is like a wolf. When a female faces danger, she becomes desultory -- becomes halfhearted, passive, unfocused, erratic.
That is how the poet Sylvia Platt felt about competing against her poet husband Ted Hughes. She never would keep pace with him, much less surpass him. He as a poet would always accomplish much more than she.
I do not know whether Eleanor Bergstein ever tried to write poetry, but she surely felt that she never would match her poet husband, Michael Goldman. Even writing prose, she perhaps felt she could not match him.
