chapter 25

Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics

Anita Helle

In an era prior to informed consent, Sylvia Plath was shattered by what she
described as a ‘rather brief and traumatic experience’ of ‘badly-given shock
treatments’.1 Plath was twenty. Aurelia Plath’s notes indicate that this took
place without adequate benefit of relaxants and anaesthesia, at a private
hospital in Carlisle, Massachusetts. Months later, at the end of 1953, she
received insulin and further electroshock therapy at McLean Hospital in
Belmont. The earlier set of treatments were worse than the last, although
even at McLean’s, Plath writes about electroshock with an ‘ugh’.
Readers and scholars have readily empathised with this moment in
Plath’s biography. Electroshock treatment has been regarded as
a traumatic kernel whose gaps and lacunae became available as literary
subject matter between 1958 and 1960, with poems of oracular possession
such as ‘Hanging Man’ and ‘Poem for a Birthday’.2 Whether the emphasis
is laid on suicide or aesthetic triumph, the teleological arc of the over-
determined narrative is best exemplified by Anne Stevenson’s expansive
claim in Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, that electroshock was the
‘menace behind nearly everything [Plath] ever wrote’,3 and by another
critic’s more recent assertion that electroshock ‘would forever re-wire
Plath’s sense of identity’.4 Of course, as Tracy Brain, Marjorie Perloff
and Jacqueline Rose have in various ways observed, we now know that
had Plath’s Bell Jar remained in circulation under Plath’s pseudonym
Victoria Lucas, and/or if Hughes’s version of the Ariel poems had not
come into print so soon after Plath’s death, marketers of Plath’s books
might not have found profit in advertising the most sensational aspects of
the story (one Turkish translation of The Bell Jar blatantly features a head
pinned between electrodes on its jacket).5
Recent biographers have made a few new discoveries, but have not done
much to fill out cultural or historical contexts. Plath’s psychiatrists have
been named. Connie Kirk draws on Plath’s calendar to more precisely date
the initial round of shock treatments on 29 July 1953 at the private
264

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 Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics 265
outpatient clinic.6 Biographies such as Elizabeth Winder’s Pain, Parties,
Work have been more expressly interested in Plath and trauma without,
however, incorporating insights about literary style from the field of critical
trauma studies, which might lead us to considering temporal dislocations,
repetitions, silences, ocular disturbances.7 Bob Fournier’s clinical biogra-
phy, Trauma and the Golden Lady, draws from in-house interviews at
Valleyhead, including one official’s perspective that the hospital had
‘developed a reputation as a popular site, perhaps too popular’ for out-
patient electroshock, and that physicians who oversaw shock treatment
were doctors who travelled from other hospitals, informally known as ‘the
shockers’.8 Abigail Cheever persuasively argues that since the millennium,
the autobiographical confessional narrative of Plath’s depression and treat-
ment is more often read through pharmacological narratives such as Prozac
Nation, in which the depressed person is a special kind of citizen, ‘a self
who somehow lacks the capacity to be a self’; by extension, even in a post-
confessional environment, Plath’s biographical narrative seems an espe-
cially over-determined case of repeating an origin story of pain.9
To be sure, historical and discursive contexts of electroshock have been
retroactively applied to events of 1953, reframing or confirming cultural
expectations. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Plath’s autobiographical
confessional breakdown story became an open subtext for social move-
ments. By the 1970s, an anti-psychiatry movement had marched onto the
pages of feminist criticism in works such as Phyllis Chesler’s Women and
Madness; R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self had rendered the ‘madness’ that
electroshock proposed to cure as a cultural symptom of the patient’s
alienation in language from the physician’s ideal of normality. New evi-
dence about the special hazards of bilateral electroshock for creative writers
came to light in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s through biographies of figures
such Ernest Hemingway, Antonin Artaud and Paul Celan10 – namely, that
beyond retrograde amnesia, there was the risk of damage to speech-centres
at the frontal temporal lobes.
As the celebrated film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on the
1962 novel by Ken Kesey, and the publication of Michel Foucault’s
Madness and Civilization (published in 1961 and first translated into
English in 1964) popularised the view of clinical shock as a means of social
control, new ethical and political questions were raised. These included
questions about whether family members who aided in treatment should
be subject to exculpation or exoneration. An interview conducted around
the time that Aurelia Schober Plath cooperated with Rose Leiman
Goldemberg on the American Place Theater production of the play

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 266 anita helle
Letters Home in 1979, Aurelia Plath expressed remorse about Plath’s initial
outpatient treatment and concern that even the new dramatic portrayal, in
which lines of overlapping dialogue between mother and daughter were
written to emphasise the empathy and mutuality, might never exonerate
the view of the mother as the ‘ogre’ responsible for the tragic wound of
electroshock.11 By 1993, when Adrienne Rich in What is Found There:
Notebooks on Poetry and Politics wrote that US entry into the Persian
Gulf War ‘bestowed electroshock’ on a ‘chronically depressive nation’,
the biographical subtext had been thoroughly incorporated into a critical
social narrative of mass behavioural engineering of the national body
electric, where, I would contend, Plath’s figurations of electricity and the
shocks of modernity began, long before she had ECT.12
So what new questions, alternative perspectives and counterpoints does
a material aesthetics of electricity offer? For one thing, as the examples
above indicate, the cultural ground of electroshock’s social and historical
meanings has long been dynamic and shifting. This has to do not only with
changing social attitudes but also with the labile metaphorical possibilities
of electricity and shock that have provided ample ground for literary figura-
tion. Often seen as a master-trope of metaphor, the word electric (Grk:
Elektron) was used by Francis Bacon to characterise the transformative
action of materials such as amber and metals, especially copper, in attract-
ing other objects.13 From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Ted Hughes’s late
theory of style as an ‘electrograph’ of ‘the writer’s whole sensibility’
through an epigenetic trace in language,14 cultural associations with elec-
tricity and electroshock have been fraught with themes of guilt and self-
knowledge, moral recrimination and scenarios of death and rebirth. More
recently, scholars such as Paul Gilmore, Jennifer Lieberman and Carolyn
Thomas de la Peña have supposed that ‘a language of electricity’ in modern
literary texts constitutes what Gilmore terms a ‘strain of romanticism on
both sides of the Atlantic’ well into the 1950s,15 distilling cultural anxieties
associated with rapidly expanding distribution networks of electricity
grids, mass systems of communication and accelerated consumerism
dependent on electricity.
The new, two-volume Letters of Sylvia Plath adds to the biographical
account of Plath’s treatment provided in Letters Home, although on the
narrow subject of electroshock the news is less than might have been
anticipated. In part, this is understandable, given that Plath did not
immediately have words for what she had gone through at Valleyhead or
at McLean’s, and was eager to return to collegiate ‘normality’. In the
Talcott Parsons era, the job of the physician was to tell the patient what

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 Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics 267
to do, and the job of the patient was to apply mental hygiene and do
anything needed to get well, including bringing a positive attitude.16 In
letters, Plath refers to her own strategies for self-protection. In a letter to
Gordon Lameyer of January 1954, she notes that she had just emerged from
a rather ‘singular experience’, and reflects on the need to ‘play parts’, her
smile being only a ‘protective and camouflaging mask’.17 We learn that,
upon returning to Smith, Plath confided details of her experience to a few
close friends, including Jane Truslow, who ‘had shock at Baldpate’, to Jane
V. Anderson, the model for her character of Joan Gilling in The Bell Jar,
and to Marcia Brown, whose mother had been briefly institutionalised.18
Earlier letters also reveal another pattern that is echoed in her short
fiction and collage scrapbook – well before electroshock: a fascination with
electricity as an aspect of culture that might be mythologised and mystified
as well as critiqued. In a poem entitled ‘I Am an American’, folded into
a letter that Plath wrote to Melvin Woody after her first year at Smith, the
speaker sees herself as created by a collective national body – or ‘belly’ –
electric. Its first lines, ‘We all know we are created equal: / All conceived in
the hot blood belly/ of the twentieth century turbine’,19 offers a 1950s take
on Henry Adams’s ‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’ (1900); it also provides
a sexualised cyborgian image of violent human coupling that relies on
appropriating the female body. In the letter, Plath introduces her poem
with invective: ‘I too get seething mad at civilization, dogma, prejudice’
(LV1 346). In satirical fashion, the poem goes on to link electricity to other
material currencies – the postal system, the monetary system and consumer
products (‘the Bendix’ vacuum cleaner), all of which stamp out indivi-
duality. In its catalogue form, and its two parallel symmetrical stanzas,
Plath’s poem can be read as a response to the popular schoolroom classic of
the same title, ‘I Am an American’ (1916) by Russian Jewish poet Elias
Lieberman, a patriotic poem well known to New Englanders. Lieberman’s
poem equates assimilation with technological progress and the modern
electrified city: ‘As each new star in the nation’s flag / Keen eyes of mine
foresaw her greater glory / . . . the man-hives of her billion wired cities.’20
If Plath used electricity to materialise the national body electric – or
‘belly’ electric – in ‘I Am an American’, she could also idealise the
materiality of language in textual exchanges. In a remarkable letter of
Joycean wordplay responding to a thick missive from Gordon Lameyer,
written during the first month of her return from McLean, Plath com-
ments on the ‘mystic electric current of understanding’ that emerges from
riffing on great works in the British tradition, an interest she and Lameyer
shared. Plath writes, ‘And why should I quote? Speak in other voices?

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 268 anita helle
Because, like the archetypal wanderer, I am part of all that I have met, and
all that I have seen is part of me, and there is a mystic electric current of
understanding . . . that runs through all the subjective worlds we two share
fragments of.’21 The letters also offer glimpses of a more intimate, shared
language between Plath and Hughes, in which electric shock could be
filtered through Plath’s hyperbolic dark humour. Writing one Sunday in
October of her fall semester alone at Cambridge (Sunday was a day of ‘no
mail’), the yawning distance of intimacy between them prompts Plath to
conjure what she admits is an exaggerated, ‘hellish’ scenario: ‘I get these
electric shocks of knowing how I miss you.’22 In the same month, Hughes’s
letters imagine their distance on terms that parallel hers: ‘sitting around in
a daze of shock’ and with ‘incomplete brain surgery’.23 This is a language of
electricity, electroshock and surgery that Hughes will return to in Birthday
Letters.
By the time Plath’s signed on for her stint as a medical secretary in the
Adult Psychiatric Clinic in October and November of 1958, she already saw
hospitals as electrified cities, with cell-like cubicles and bureaucratic
regimes, wired devices and power grids, operations that go on in relative
ignorance of the often-secretive, subliminal imaginings of humans in their
midst. As is well known, ‘The Daughters of Blossom Street’ was originally
entitled ‘This Earth our Hospital’. Plath’s story paces off a geospatial
imaginary that is made more vivid by visiting the site. Massachusetts
General looks in one direction towards Blossom Street, the location of
the morgue in the story, and to Boston Common on another side, twin
poles in the story’s theme of wished-for individual and communal redemp-
tion. As in a later poem, ‘Berck-Plage’, the dialectic between malignancy
and hope in ‘The Daughters of Blossom Street’ is animated by oblique
allusions to that most ‘electrical’ of all Eliot poems, ‘East Coker’, in which
an ‘electric heat / hypnotizes’ and ‘fancy lights’ seductively ‘risk enchant-
ment’, even as they threaten to suffocate and sap vitality.24 Plath notes in
her journals at the time that she was ‘jam full of Eliot titles’ (J 489). It is
interesting to speculate as to why, in her Journals, Plath insists that ‘This
Earth Our Hospital’, represents an ‘advance’ from her earlier hospital
story, ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’. She liked the former so
much, in fact, that while waiting to see if The Atlantic would take it, she
muses that it ‘should be a Best American Short Story’ (J 489). In any case,
in ‘This Earth Our Hospital’ the apocalyptic events touched off by an
electrical storm and its disruptions are not spuriously dramatic: the elec-
trical atmospherics and the electrical things in the story are well integrated
with the affects and sensations of characters, a putative community of

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 Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics 269
women who huddle together as a hurricane bears down. As in the type of
Frank O’Connor short stories Plath thought she should write, the char-
acters are, as O’Connor recommends, ‘submerged populations’ floating in
separate spot-lit zones.25
As in Eliot’s poem, an ‘electric heat’ in ‘The Daughters of Blossom
Street’ fuses the animalistic with the human and mechanical into a thick
compound. Electricity is outside, in a naturally occurring form, and inside
the hospital’s power grids: heat melts the starch in the blouse at the
narrator’s armpit and clings to the damp cement walls of the hospital’s
basement tunnels; but it is not outside the discourse of power and power
lines. Lights from the downed power lines in the electrical storm fail and
flicker off and on at critical moments in the plot, evoking the lack of saving
insight on the part of her characters as well as the absence of redemptive
sources. The story’s electrical sensations, anticipating the later ‘Berck-
Plage’, mirror the purgatorial atmosphere of Eliot’s poem in which ‘the
whole earth is our hospital / endowed by a millionaire’, with no Christ-like
‘wounded surgeons’ capable of ‘plying the redemptive steel’ that might
cure the disease of mortality at its centre.26 When the storm threatens to
blow everything up, ‘shaking [the Clinic] to its roots’, Plath’s narrative
relies on film noir lighting effects: characters take on semblances of the
automatons they have become in their bureaucratic roles, ‘wax dummies’,
figures ‘flattened back against the wall’ (JP 124–5). In the maelstrom of
uncertainty, panic is imaged as a ‘galloping hysteria’, the collapse of
a system. In the aftermath of a power failure, ‘we [the lowly assistants]
have to feel our way along the walls in the semi-dark. Everywhere doctors
and interns are snapping out orders, nurses gliding by white as ghosts in
their uniforms, and stretchers with people bundled on them – groaning, or
crying’ (JP 129). A semblance of relief is offered in one scene when the
hospital’s back-up generator apparently takes over, and four copper lights
in a formal meeting room burn more steadily; but these lights only cast
theatrically distancing effects. In Plath’s ‘Hospital Notes’, she was suffi-
ciently impressed by the details of the Hunnewell Meeting Room that she
makes detailed notes about four lights that had been installed to modernise
the space (J 627).27 Unsurprisingly, then, when the women carry on with
their bureaucratic reporting on the dead from within the sealed-off room,
they are worse, not better off. Sepia portraits of the Civil War surgeons
whose faces line the walls of the Hunnewell Room are emblems of paternal
failure. The instruments gleaming in the glass cabinets above the women’s
heads under the light of the copper bowls cast no more than a simulacrum
of their faces on the dark, coffin-like wooden table, which the narrator tells

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 270 anita helle
us is so ‘polished you can see your face in it’ (JP 117). In this story, as in
‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’, the hospital is more than just
a ‘hive with its billion wires’. It is a place where lines of force and power are
sufficiently part of an administrative apparatus that only armoured char-
acters are visible, notably the ‘tinted blonde chignon’ of the supervisor,
whose head gleams under the copper lights like a ‘cap of mail’ (JP 118).
In ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’, Plath’s electrified hospital is
also a media-wired environment. It has been too easy to over-focus on the
dream of ‘one great brotherhood’ (JP 155) that doesn’t pan out in this story,
or the seemingly biographical narrative of electroshock in its ending, with
its ‘metal box covered with dials and gauges’, which seems to be ‘eyeing me,
copper-head ugly’ (JP 165). But there is another layer to this story, another
electric box at its centre, in the shape of a transcribing machine that sits on
the narrator’s desk, and which she terms an ‘audiograph’ (JP 156). Plath’s
precise use of this term makes it possible to identify the device as the Gray
Audograph, or ‘soundscript’ machine, an electronic transcription device
commonly used in medical secretarial settings from the 1940s to the
1970s.28 As a black box, the dictating machine uncannily resembles the
electroshock machine in form if not function: it is portable, metal, about
the same size as electroshock boxes of the era, and emits a red fluorescent
signal. The cover of the user manual portrays a preternatural blonde with
headphones piping sound from the mouth of the handsome doctor to the
secretary’s ears. One advert for the machine from 1953 features a sound
track from a popular dance-band record that hit the top of the charts in the
late 1950s with a schmaltzy lyric (‘It’s cherry pink and apple blossom white
when true love comes your way . . . the poets say’). In another advert,
a doctor in the upper right-hand corner of the ad is speaking directly into
the ear of the medical secretary at the lower right, advertising ‘a perfect
partnership’ (‘Gray Audograph’).
Alan Ramón Clinton brings a fresh critical lens to ‘Johnny Panic and the
Bible of Dreams’ by considering the fate of the poet-dreamer as one writing
under media conditions, or into media conditions of what some media
theorists have termed ‘electracy’.29 He rightly notes that the dream tran-
scription from the sound text is an impossible archival project, because
dreams occupy the realm of the imaginary, while the discourse of health
and happiness, the discourse of the hospital, occupies the realm of the
symbolic.30 As long as she is merely transcribing dreams, the narrator is
bound to a bibliographic method, and therefore to ‘dream connoisseur-
ship’ (JP 153). Transcribing sound-text from a dictaphone clearly is anti-
thetical to the poet’s vocation as the dreamer of dreams, yet the situation is

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 Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics 271
integral to the story. Ramón Clinton does not comment upon another
reason for the narrator’s desire to compulsively record her made-up dreams
in alternative notebooks: that is, the darkly gendered and intimate associa-
tions of the dictaphone with the fabrication of workplace romance. In
addition, the narrator wants to capture ‘unfinished messages’ from the
‘great I Am’ (JP 155), a comically expressed yearning for greater meaning.
The distance between the desire of the dreamer who hopes to impossibly
transcribe and collect dreams stands in opposition to the physician’s
worldly cure. This desire is further frustrated by the dreamer’s realisation
of an architectonic dream of dreams in which she would fashion an
autotelic reservoir of narratives that will fail.
We read about this failure through the narrator’s other aerial flights,
over the illuminated city, and, in mock-Icarian fashion (powered by
a helicopter) over ‘Lake Nightmare’ and the ‘Bog of Madness’. These aerial
views also fail to offer unmediated transparency, revealing only ‘dark
masses moving and heaving’, and ‘figuring out the wheel and the alphabet’,
earlier phases of media archaeology (JP 154). It is the dream of the
pieceworker at the fluorescent factory, another worker who lives and
burns in the hum of an electronic environment, which most closely mirrors
the narrator’s plight. The narrator is exquisitely attuned to her electrified
environment, and to what Tracy Brain describes as the ill effects of toxic
environments.31 She, too, works under ‘ice-bright florescence that makes
the skin look green and all the pink and red flushes dead black-purple’ (JP
157). What the narrator learns from the fluorescent worker’s dream is that:
he was ‘scared blue he’d only go to hell’ when it turns out he was ‘only
afraid of the dark’, (JP 157), but the narrator’s concerns are not so easily
dismissible.
Although Esther Greenwood’s dramatic episode of electroshock in The
Bell Jar is often read as a literal rendering of Plath’s electroshock experi-
ence, Plath’s narrative in The Bell Jar incorporates multiple narratives of
electrification from myth, science and modern cinema. As Luke Ferretter
notes, The Bell Jar is pre-scripted by journalistic and cinematic influences
that were part of Plath’s cultural vocabulary prior to her electroshock
experience.32 When Plath writes the ‘drubbing’ or convulsive scene of
electroshock, she equates the sharp intake of breath that precedes convul-
sive seizure by drawing from mythologies of oracular possession and poetic
seizure. She attributes sounds and lights that electroshock boxes don’t
actually emit – ‘Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee’ and ‘air crackling with blue light’
(BJ 117). In these images, William Blake meets Carl Jung: the iconographic
representation of blue light is reminiscent of Blake’s A Vision of the Last

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 272 anita helle
Judgement, in which blue colouration charges the moment of explosion
with an overwhelming power.33 Plath’s more immediate source for these
images would likely have been Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious, which comments on flashes of lightning as a symbol used by
Paracelsus to suggest a sudden, unexpected and overpowering change of
psychic conditions.34 The sudden plunge into the unconscious rendered
through this imagery and sonic effects precipitates the memory of a second
electrical ‘shock’, a memory critical to Esther’s narrative, but a puzzle to
critics who pass over it. Awakening from shock, Esther recalls having been
shocked by the fuzzy or frayed cord of a lamp belonging to her father’s
study, when she attempts to move it from the side of her mother’s bed. The
explicit description of the copper shade ‘surmounting’ (BJ 118) the bulb is
sexual, and the cord itself, the umbilicus tying her to her mother, reiterates
the daughter’s desire to separate from her mother, as well as Esther’s
identification of male figures with powers of sex and language. As in
a dream the second shock is predicate to the first. The ‘old metal floor
lamp’ (BJ 118) confirms the tawdriness that class-conscious Esther associ-
ates with her familial background by contrast to the glamorous world of
Mademoiselle.
Tawdriness was a staple of the artificial lighting effects Plath adopted
from the film noir cinema style and from The Snake Pit (1948), a film that
made a ‘deep impression’ on Plath and which she must have seen shortly
after it came out (LV1 657). The film’s director, Anatole Litvak, and the co-
author of its screen play, Millen Brand, have both been linked to the
development of noir cinema in its classic era 1930–60.35 According to film
historian Patrick Keating, references to indirect lighting and explicit refer-
ence to the iconographic signs of light (lamps, shades, bulbs) could bring
a sense of wonder or alienation to technological achievements and ideas of
modern progress. Within the diegesis, the varying intensities and degrees of
electrical illumination became the signature style of film noir in establish-
ing character (typically dopplegangers, detectives, femmes fatales), map-
ping space and colouring ideological perspectives.36 Plath’s cinematic
viewing habits (which included Hitchcock films) included another fore-
runner of film noir style, the German expressionist film The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari (1920), which she immediately grasped as material for themes
of the novel she was writing at the time she saw the film in Cambridge. In
a letter to her mother, Plath comments that the ‘jagged black-and-white
sets grow out of states of mind and everywhere there is a subtle reversal
between the worlds of sanity and insanity. Really Weird and haunting’
(LV1 1002). In The Snake Pit, the noir lighting style applies primarily to

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 Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics 273
depictions of the asylum ward, where the inmates are seen only in pools of
shadow, denoting their subordinate status, and are uttering nonsense
syllables.
In The Bell Jar, Plath strategic use of light effects comments directly on
a range of subjects, the contrast between glamour and affluence as well as
the contrast between city and suburbs, and exterior/subterranean perspec-
tives on the electric shock clinic. The ‘celestially white kitchens’ of
Ladies’ Day are ‘photographed under brilliant lights’ (BJ 21); for
a claustrophobic effect, ‘glittering white torture chamber tiles’ bounce
light back in the Ladies’ Day bathroom where Esther retreats when she is
poisoned at the luncheon (BJ 36). Doreen, the Marilyn-like fashion doll, is
more recognisably both sinister and the glamorous type of femme fatale
because her glamour has grown into a second skin – her gown sticks to her
skin by ‘some kind of electricity’ (BJ 4). Esther begins to know she is sick
once she’s home and even the clothes she is wearing are ‘unfamiliar’. She
tells us, ‘The skirt was a green dirndl skirt with tiny black, white and
electric blue shapes swarming across it, and it stuck out like a lampshade’
(BJ 92). Perhaps the most compelling use of film noir lighting – a departure
from film noir’s portrayals of suburbs as brightly lit places, are the pools of
shadow – ‘full bosomy elms made a tunnel of shade’ (BJ 107) that mark
Esther’s passage back from Dr Gordon’s office through the tunnels and
elms of suburbia.
Plath’s writing of electroshock may be read as part of what Tim
Armstrong characterises as modernism’s desire to ‘intervene in the body’
to render the body modern through biomedical, behavioural and techno-
logical means.37 Electroshock may have provided Plath with a storehouse
of images of bodily disruption, metaphors and plot kernels. But when we
consider Plath’s multiple narratives of electricity and electric shock in
broader cultural contexts, they contribute to a mesh of affects and sensa-
tions, ideas and things that are by no means reducible to biography.

Notes
1. Letter to Eddie Cohen, 28 December 1953, LV1, 655.
2. Middlebrook, Her Husband, 110–11.
3. Stevenson, Bitter Fame, 47.
4. Clinton, ‘Sylvia Plath and Electracy’, 60–71.
5. See Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath, 8–10. For the cover of the Turkish edition
(1975), see Temple, ‘A Fifty-Year Visual History’.
6. Kirk, Sylvia Plath, 76.

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 274 anita helle
7. Winder, Pain, Parties, Work.
8. Fournier, Trauma and the Golden Lady, 118.
9. Farland, ‘Sylvia Plath’s Anti-Psychiatry Movement’, 256; Cheever, Real
Phonies, 95.
10. See, for example, Felsteiner, Paul Celan.
11. Robertson, ‘To Sylvia Plath’s Mother’.
12. Rich, What Is Found There, 15.
13. Bacon, Novum Organum, 457.
14. Letter to Tom Paulin, 6 August 1998, LTH, 727.
15. Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism; Lieberman, Electricity in American Life and
Letters; Thomas, Body Electric.
16. Fox, Sociology of Medicine, 17–25.
17. Letter to Gordon Lameyer, 10 January 1954, LV1, 661.
18. Letter to Jane V. Anderson, 25 February 1954, LV1, 695.
19. Letter to Melvin Woody, 22 June 1951, LV1, 345–7.
20. Lieberman, ‘I Am an American’, Paved Streets. See suzyred.com/american
.html. Retrieved 15 June 2017.
21. Letter to Gordon Lameyer, 21 February 1954, LV1 691.
22. Letter to Ted Hughes, 21 October 1956, LV1 1319.
23. Letter to Sylvia Plath, 3 October 1956, LTH 55.
24. Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 188.
25. O’Connor, ‘The Lonely Voice’, Short Story Theories, 85–7.
26. Eliot, The Poems of T.S. Eliot, 190. See Gilbert, ‘On the Beach with Sylvia
Plath’, 121–38.
27. Plath underscored basic elements in her Merriam Webster Dictionary; she
would have been aware of the definition of copper as ‘one of the best
conductors of electricity’, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/copper.
28. Please see obsoletemedia.org/audograph/ and www.youtube.com/watch?v=
wyM0H11-rjs. Retrieved 1 October 2017.
29. Clinton, ‘Electracy’, 60. On ‘electracy’, see Ulmer, Internet Invention.
30. Clinton, ‘Electracy’, 60.
31. Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath, 93–7.
32. Ferretter, Sylvia Plath’s Fiction, 49.
33. Blake, The Paintings and Drawings, 826.
34. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 303.
35. Spicer and Hanson, A Companion to Film Noir, 101.
36. Keating, ‘Film Noir and the Culture of Electric Light’, esp. 68–70.
37. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, 6.

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