.Parul_Sehgal profiles Jacqueline Rose, a feminist-psychoanalytic writer and critic whose work dissects everything from poetry to Zionism.
” , a feminist reading of the poet that refused to reduce her to a bundle of symptoms or to mine the poems for biography. Rose insisted on the violent, emancipating breadth of Plath’s imagination, and turned the distorting fantasies projected on her poetry back on the reader. She went on to take this approach to studying women as varied as Marilyn Monroe and Rosa Luxemburg , tracing overlooked acts of creative defiance.
Psychoanalysis, for Rose, begins with “a mind in flight,” fleeing its own pain and obscuring its meanings by projection, displacement, inversion. As we walked, the ground beneath her feet seemed thick with the detritus of memory. “All the long gone darlings,” Plath called her dead. “They / Get back, though, soon, / Soon.
Two daughters were born soon afterward: Gillian in the fall of 1947, and Jacqueline twenty months later. Gillian was the serious one, Rose said: “She was reading Plato while I was sitting on a swing, listening to pop music, thinking about looking pretty, and boys.” Rose told me that the great wish of her childhood was to best her “serious, pained” sister; it was “a productive rivalry.”
The question of closeness—closeness desired, permitted, negotiated, regretted—recurred in my conversations with Rose. Freud, I remembered, kept a figurine of a porcupine on his desk. He was fond of Schopenhauer’s parable about a group of porcupines on a cold winter’s day. Huddling, they were pricked by one another’s quills, and sprang apart; chilled, they again tried to nestle together.
Down the hill, she explained, is the cemetery where Gillian is buried, and where her mother’s ashes repose. “It’s the street on which I live,” she said, pinning map to metaphor. “She plunges you straight into the world,” her friend the historian Sally Alexander told me, “the most uncomfortable, obscure, and difficult moments. But she also reminds you that a thinking human being is capable of action in that world. How can we think through these difficulties?” It’s here that Jacqueline and Gillian’s “thought,” Alexander added. “That comes from their parents, or their unspoken history—that sense that there was something to be uncovered and revealed and thought through.
She pointed out a photograph: “Braham. Look at that beautiful Jewish face. Look, how beautiful.” Then a picture of the trio—her, Braham, and Gillian—as children: “The three of us, deeply linked. Him with the authority, here. That’s his bar mitzvah.”
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