For many reasons, despite her rocky and sad life and background, Sylvia Plath's writing is often read by young, literary minded women in their teens or preteens, and is taken as an awakening, enlightening experience. The Bell Jar is the bible of reclusive, pre-jaded, pre-intellectual brooders, distressed that their peers are concerned with petty and uninteresting minutia and that their parents are unable to understand them. Most of us grow out of this phase. Perhaps one of the reasons Plath's writing has resonated with this sect throughout the decades is because she never did.
But some poems do offer us a glimpse of her romantic side, or of her appreciation of and ability to be touched by things romantic. Most of these poems are either unknown or significantly less famous than other more dark and emotionally violent ones. "Above the Oxbow" is one such poem that Plath wrote while she attended Smith College in which she narrates the scene at the corner "Up Pleasant Street at Main," in Northampton. She admires our diminutive chunk of the Appalachians. But even here, her instinct to deride the mountains is not overcome; she can't help but point out that "We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks…" Her derision is couched in compliments–the mounts are "lofty enough"–but it is there nonetheless. She does, however, identify with these mountains, with their smallness, and with her fellow Valley-dwellers; she speaks in the first person plural for the entire poem. She is one of many here, happy, I'd say. Content with being someone who "live[s] in the bottom of valleys," because at the bottom, there is always possibility, especially if you don't act on it. "A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback, looks / To be meant for climbing," she notices. But then when you get there, "Tops define themselves as places / Where nothing's higher to be looked to." The top is where she eventually got, presumably. With no where higher to look, did Plath see no other option than death; was that her ultimate "top?"
A fellow Advocate-er once said something along the lines of "this valley's walls are slicked with grease," meaning once you get here it's hard to climb out. For many, the appeal of the Valley is, apparently, its pastoral beauty, it's proximity to wilderness. For others, it probably has more to do with the slow pace of living, the disconnect from the outside world. Such an emphasis is placed on the importance of being local here. That's not to say outsiders are not welcome, but once they are taken in, a pressure to take pride in the area is hoisted upon them, so saturated with local-ness is the culture here.
But because we are so locally minded, we are also inevitably mindful of the boundaries of locale. A valley is a very specific thing–a walled off and separate thing. To leave a valley, theoretically, you must climb, else you remain in the valley forever, or until you reach the ocean.
Admittedly, as someone who's life is increasingly involved with the internet, the world is a smaller place, and it doesn't or shouldn't matter where you are; because of this technology, anyone who can drum up a following has the potential to have a global voice. But are the limits we impose by emphasizing the importance of being local too hard to overcome, or are they good things? Is it beneficial to stay put, to be content, to be "lofty enough?" If we are to take Plath's life and body of work as evidence, perhaps it is beneficial to forever be mindful of possibility. At "the bottom of valleys" there's nothing to do but drift, climb, or stay put. By staying put, climbing is always a possibility, and the top is never where you are. A fine thing if the top only reveals "nothing higher to be looked to."
I am thinking of Plath today and of her tragic life because news of her son's death has crossed the wires. Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks committed suicide this weekend. Family and friends say he became interested in fish because his father was an avid fisherman. Hughes' locale was a remote one. In a statement his sister Freida released, she indicated that he had "been battling depression for some time." He was a private man who was wary of publicizing his tumultuous family history in the local press; another drawback of a small, locally minded community is that everyone knows your business.
