From the New Yorker, August 1993

The true self is aggressive, rude, dirty, disorderly, sexual; the false self, which mothers and society instruct us to assume, is neat, clean, tidy, polite, content to cut a chaste rosebud with a pair of silver-plated scissors. "One day I shall manage without her." None of us can manage without some of the hard white stuff of social convention around us, the carapace that protects as well as hides out instinctual core. In "The Bell Jar" Plath closely observes the mental disintegration of her auto-biographical heroine, Esther Greenwood, noting that she hasn't washed her hair or changed her clothes in three weeks. "The reason I hadn't...was becauses it seemed so silly," Esther says. "It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash it again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it." Soon after this, Esther tries to kill herself (as Plath had tried) by crawling under the breezeway of her mother's house and swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. When Alaverez was struck by the smell of Plath's hair on Christmas Eve, 1962, Plath was evidently once again in a condition of wanting to do everything once and for all and be through with it. Opposing the priestess with the long, feral hair was the ultra-clean American girl of Dorothea Krook's description. In "the Journals." Plath's writing is laid out on a kind of grid of "clean" and "dirty" lines of self-representation. On the clean side, she obsessively sets down the baths and showers she takes, the times she washes her hair, the laundry she does, her housecleanings and tidyings;; once she even describes the scrubbing of a pot. On the dirty side, she writes of the clogged pores of her skin, her sinuses full of mucus, her menstrual blood, her throwings up. In an extraordinary passage, written while she was an undergraduate at Smith, Plath presages the precisely observing, perversely transgressing poet of "Ariel " as she celebrates "the illicit sensuous delight I get from picking my nose."