Sylvia Plath (post 7): Her letters reveal “a split, almost bifurcated personality…‘my brown-haired personality’ and ‘the frivolous giddy gilded creature’ ”

“One slowly gets a sense of a split, almost bifurcated personality, all rhapsodic enthusiasm on the one side and all dark apprehensions on the other…

“Plath herself appears to be aware of this uneasy duality, which she refers to under the rubrics of ‘my brown-haired personality’ and ‘the frivolous giddy gilded creature who careened around corners at the wheel of a yellow convertible.’ It was probably no accident that she wrote her senior thesis at Smith on the idea of ‘the Double’ in two of Dostoevsky’s novels.” (1).

1. “Review: Who Is Sylvia Plath? Daphne Merkin reviews an unabridged, annotated collection of the budding poet’s candid letters” December 15, 2017, Wall Street Journal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-who-is-sylvia-plath-1513371988