ABSTRACT
At the height of her writing career, Sylvia Plath viewed herself as a professional author and increasingly sought to represent herself as such. While drawing on Elaine Tyler May’s influential study of Cold War culture, my analysis of gendered ideology in the 1950s and early 1960s stresses the intersection between discourses specific to the Cold War and the Fordist economic structure that originated in the late 1910s. The notion that femininity was incommensurable with professional work was reinforced by both systems. This ideology of incommensurability led Plath to represent the professional woman as an abject figure. In The Bell Jar (1962) and the Ariel (1965) poems this form of abjection intersects with political and racial abjection. I also pay close attention to Plath’s engagement with a wide range of cultural institutions: universities, magazines, and publishing houses. In examining Plath’s ambition to publish in the New Yorker, I foreground the significance of socioeconomic class for this influential magazine. Plath’s work underscores women’s precarious class position, as unequal pay and academic discrimination made it difficult for them to maintain a middle-class status.
