How silent? Food for thought...
"... for Plath indeed wrote about herself and the people she knew as if they were characters in a novel. ... Plath writes about people with a novelist's noticing eye, and the journals' atmosphere of intrusive intimacy derives from this. We "know" Hughes and Sassoon and Dick Norton and Aurelia and Plath herself in the way we "know" characters in a novel, which is more deeply and clearly than we know anyone in life except our closest intimates...
...Because the Annas and ... Holden Caulfields ... do not exist outside the pages of their novels, we are unembarassed by our voyeurism, by the abashing amount of personal information we receive about them. With the characters of Hughes and Sassoon and Norton and Aurelia, who have counterparts in life, we lose our feeling of comfortable omniscience; we feel we should look the other way - as in the that moment of embarassment when we meet our analyst on the street. As the analyst doesn't "belong" there - he should exist only in the consulting room - so the characters in Plath's journals become displaced persons of a sort."
- The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm, Papermac 1995, pp 96-97
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