THE SLICKS

When women speak out.

In a trenchant feminist critique, Nelson (The Argonauts, 2015) expounds on fame, ambition, and the patriarchal silencing of women by focusing on two cultural icons: poet Sylvia Plath and singer/songwriter Taylor Swift. Because both “traffic in making the personal public,” they have suffered harsh consequences: “voyeurism and sadism, idolatry and demonization.” Although Plath’s greatest fame occurred after her suicide, in 1963, praise from some quarters has been undercut by disparagement from others; like Swift, she has been accused of self-absorption and self-indulgence, with “calls for the artist to look outside herself for subject matter” and “charges of her vulnerability being faux.” As Swift has become increasingly popular, she has inspired “round after round of resentment, animosity, and threat.” But unlike Emily Dickinson, who looked askance at the possibility of being in the public eye, Plath and Swift coveted the power—and the remuneration—that comes with recognition. Plath, Nelson notes, repeatedly sent her work to mass market magazines; “I will slave and slave until I break into those slicks,” she vowed. She was deeply disappointed when her novel The Bell Jar received only a few lackluster reviews when it was published in January 1963. Already overwhelmed by depression, four weeks later, she killed herself. Swift, whose lyrics “make nods to Plath” and also to Dickinson, understands the relationship between death, fame, and femininity and, more crucially, the relationship between fame and power. Plath felt an enormous drive “toward freedom, toward power, and a rage  against the conditions that inhibited it, including those within herself.” Swift has harnessed her own power, wielding it to create herself as an “economic force, and element of nature.” Nelson admires Swift’s audacity, just as she regrets the forces that defeated Plath.

A sensitive meditation on women’s quests.