• Speaking Through Her: Christine Jeffs’s Sylvia and the ongoing misinterpretation of Sylvia Plath

The 2003 film ‘Sylvia’ purports to be a biopic of Sylvia Plath’s life, immortalising the troubled writer on-screen. The film is noteworthy not for its quality or historical accuracy, however – being lacking in both – but rather for how it adapts reality to fit familiar narratives.

This essay argues that ‘Sylvia’ is interesting primarily for what its construction suggests about Plath’s endurance and her audience’s expectations. Indeed, the expectations and mythology based around Plath are steeped in stereotypes and pre-conceived biases, including ones related to gender, conceptualisation of authors, and mental illness and creativity. Modern perceptions of Plath are as much shaped by reactions to the cultural narratives surrounding her as they are by interpretations of her primary texts. It is unsurprising, therefore, that ‘Sylvia’ misrepresents its subject.

Drawing on scholarship such as Linda Hutcheon’s ‘A Theory of Adaptation’, this essay examines the misrepresentation of Plath in ‘Sylvia’, focusing on narrative as well as production-related elements of the film. It then analyses the potential rationales, conscious and subconscious, for creating the film such as it is.

The essay ultimately finds that ‘Sylvia’ perpetuates the reductive, gendered reception of Plath which figures her as passive and stereotypically feminine. After all, this is a comfortable interpretation for the peanut-crunching crowd, being one which overshadows the more radical and challenging elements of Plath’s work and person; one can conceive why half-truths were perpetuated for mainstream cinema audiences. Yet it remains important to identify such half-truths where they appear, for only in doing so can modern perceptions of Plath be understood. Indeed, scrutinising perceptions of Plath and other authors like her is vital, for such scrutiny reveals not only the biases and limitations inherent to reception, but also the risks adaptation poses to the truth of authors and their works.