What joy is joy if Sylvia be not by?

My mentor has sent me off to read, and more importantly listen to, Sylvia Plath.

I've bought ‘Ariel’ and today listened to her reading Lady Lazarus and The Birthday Present and one other from Ariel (which evidently made a huge impression as I can’t remember the name of it). So what do I think of her?

She's sharp, clipped, controlled, brittle and about as empathic as obsidian.  I have no sense, from listening to her read, of there being any softness or compassion about her: for others or for herself.  It's a very carefully constructed and presented persona that I don't think we are supposed to like. But then that would just feed into her negative feelings of self-worth, so it figures.  Leaving aside the fact that she’s clearly developed in a cultured and educated environment, there’s a sense of superciliousness about her; a sense of superiority and coldness, particularly in Lady Lazarus.  Maybe it’s the quality of the recording, but I think not.  I accept that it may well be deliberate.  I hear also a rather self-centred core: one that craves love and admiration and yet despised both those that offer that and the self for wanting it. 

And yet, when she took her life, I believe she was quite careful to ensure that her children would be as safe from the immediate physical effects of her actions as she could make them.  So not all bad, then. 

How much of her writing was a simple expression of the mental anguish and pain she lived with, and how much shock tactics designed to elicit sympathy in the reader is very hard to determine.  It’s almost impossible to separate one from the other in someone suffering severe, long-term mental illness. 

Should I be concerned that there’s little ‘emotion’ in her reading, especially in the case of something like Lady Lazarus?  I’m not particularly.  Mental illness can give people an interesting perspective on their own behaviours, often being deeply and overly analytical or distancing themselves emotionally (others, of course, are wracked with overbearing guilt, but she doesn’t strike me as falling into that camp).  Actually, that’s not true.  There is emotion in her reading, just not a kind that I find particularly appealing.  Affective, yes.  Attractive, no.