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The Ink in the Inkwell

In the third chapter of Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel, Great Expectations, David Hammond finds himself on Martha’s Vineyard, fundraising among friendly wallets vacationing on-island. He is an aide to an unnamed Barack Obama stand-in (“the Senator”) who is campaigning for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president. As Karen Cox, the bundler David is boarding with, counts out sixty thousand dollars in checks — “twice my salary,” he notes — she looks him over approvingly. He’s black like she is, if a bit younger, doing important and prestigious work on behalf of the race. “Are you going to law school?” she asks him later, in a tentative recruitment into her fair-weather community of black elites. “You should,” she advises. “You’ll make some money and you turn up here in the summers.” There’s a path laid out for David if he wants it, and he spends the rest of the book wriggling with whether he truly does. “The whole island was standing at the shore, friendly as Karen Cox in the morning, waiting for your boat to reach the dock,” he thinks, as a campaign event is about to begin.

Oak Bluffs on the Vineyard, where the fundraiser has vowed to bring in two hundred thousand dollars for the Senator, is possibly the most famous of a handful of black resort towns, including Sag Harbor’s SANS (Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Ninevah Beach, in the Hamptons), Idlewild in Michigan, and Highland Beach in Maryland. In the late nineteenth century, a slim column of black people — business owners, doctors, lawyers, and their ilk — became wealthy enough to take long, luxurious vacations, but they soon found their options limited: the Supreme Court dismantled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 eight years after its passage, and established de jure segregation in 1896 via Plessy v. Ferguson. In a sense, the black resort town sought to fulfill that case’s empty promise of “separate but equal” in the realm of leisure, as entrepreneurs saw the black elite’s desire for rest as the business opportunity that it was. Within a few years, hotels, beachfronts, boardwalks, and cabins were all established in spite of segregation and with the promise of liberation not for all, but at least for some, at least for a few months out of the year. 

The Martha’s Vineyard chapter in Great Expectations attaches the novel to a minor canon of books, films, and TV shows that use black resorts to dramatize an ambivalence toward aspiration among the black elite. These days especially, the black resort town seems like it’s everywhere, the setting for escapist beach reads and reality television, as well as more high-minded literary fiction like Cunningham’s. This micro-genre plays out a set of contradictions: between a desire for a specific vision of racial achievement and a sense of that achievement’s limits, between characters’ respect for the histories of their refuges and their uneasiness with the moral ugliness that sustains these enclaves, between a desire to elevate the race and the knowledge of the black masses that must be shunted aside in the process. As displayed in these works, the black resort town embodies a larger dynamic, making clear how the symbols of black ambition — and so-called “black excellence” — can serve to paper over the elite’s indifference to the needs of the many.

 

In the early twentieth century, black and white hoteliers alike sought to lure black vacationers. Oak Bluffs grew out of a black foothold in old Methodist and Baptist revival grounds, where by the mid-1950s black people were the “ink” of Inkwell Beach. The landmark Shearer Cottage grew from a cozy spot on the island where friends of the Shearer family might come stay to a bona fide destination, where personalities such as the singer Ethel Waters and the politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr. might show up in the guestbook. In Sag Harbor, the black sisters Maude Terry and Amaza Lee Meredith bought up plots of land in 1939 to create a cluster of summer homes. White developers built Idlewild, Michigan to draw summering black midwesterners. After getting turned away from a beach restaurant in Bay Ridge, Maryland, Frederick Douglass’s son Charles bought land on the Chesapeake and eventually incorporated it as the town of Highland Beach. 

That history serves as a backdrop in Toni Morrison’s Love, from 2003. The novel charts the rise and fall of Bill Cosey, who buys a down-on-its-luck whites-only club in 1930 and refurbishes it with the goal of creating a place where black vacationers can enjoy themselves in dignity and comfort. “Flocks of colored people would pay to be in that atmosphere,” Morrison writes. Soon, the crowds throng: “Cosey’s Hotel and Resort was the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast,” who “all felt a tick of entitlement, of longing turned to belonging in the vicinity of the fabulous, successful resort controlled by one of their own.” Cosey’s resort serves a political function — it “was more than a playground; it was a school and a haven where people debated death in the cities, murder in Mississippi, and what they planned to do about it other than grieve and stare at their children.” One character goes so far as to suggest that Cosey “helped more colored people here than forty years of government programs.”

These Jim Crow resorts didn’t just seek to affirm the humanity of their visitors, but also sought to offer relief from the pressures of life under the color line. As the historian Mark S. Foster has written, during that period “blacks could almost never achieve total relaxation,” but “they came closest to doing so when there were no whites around.” On the surface, a black resort is very similar to a white resort: sea, sand, wine parties on the shore, humble servants bowing and offering up trays of nourishment. That the black resort exists in parallel to its white counterpart is part of its appeal. As the historian Myra B. Young Armstead suggests, the black resort had “a curative power bearing a distinctly ‘race’-free character.”

That sense of relief captured the heart of the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West during girlhood family trips from Boston to Martha’s Vineyard. “I didn’t know that there was winter here,” she tells the camera in Salem Mekuria’s 1991 documentary As I Remember It. “I didn’t know that there was school here. But what I did know was that there was nobody here that called you nigger.” West’s novel The Wedding — published in 1995 and set in the black resort heyday of 1953 — centers on the Coles family, black New Yorkers whose daughter Shelby is preparing to marry a white jazzman. Years before the main action of the novel, when the bride-to-be is a little girl, she gets lost chasing a puppy. Somehow, she finds herself in one of the island’s white communities, “drawn to this sanctuary because it resembled home, with its little park and its children playing and its mothers watching them.” Even as the white families grow increasingly sympathetic toward the colored family struggling to locate their little girl, they overlook the fair-skinned Shelby in their midst because they don’t expect a black child to look so similar to their own. “Those who knew colored people only as servants and veered from thinking of them otherwise could not make any association between the poised and lovely child who had brightened their morning and the colored child who had gone and gotten herself lost,” West writes. Eventually, the whites realize that Shelby is not in fact one of their own, and the police take her home. “It was rare in this bucolic summer resort off the coast of New England to feel a ripple of unease about the color of one’s skin,” West writes. But the mode of Shelby’s return punctures the idyll: “now it was as if a cold wet wind had blown through the community.”

If Shelby’s mistaken sojourn exposes the similarities of the summering classes, a moment from Colson Whitehead’s best-selling 2009 novel Sag Harbor reinforces their differences. Now it’s 1985, but the white and black vacationers are no more integrated than they were in Shelby’s youth. While summering in the Hamptons, the fifteen-year-old Benji Cooper and his friends spy some white wanderers who have strayed too far onto the black side of a beach in SANS. The black teenagers pull out their binoculars because “any infiltration had to be checked out.” But the white couple gets nervous and turns around. “Something was off,” Benji imagines them thinking. “Everyone was brown,” he adds. “Black eyes glared down from the beach houses.” The black resort can function like a fortress. It’s a distant outpost on stolen native land — Benji and his friends spend weeks of their summer misinterpreting “sagaponac,” a word from the Shinnecock people who are otherwise absent from their community, to mean “land of the big brown nuts” instead of “ground nuts” — but it also has a border to be patrolled, watched from both sides.

 

But it’s not only white people who are kept out. In Love, when local working-class black people seek to enter Cosey’s paradise, they’re deemed unworthy and kept at bay: “Pleasantly. Regretfully. Definitely.” Morrison observes that “it comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some sort of shameful miracle.” Cosey’s little “playground” by the sea is “for folk who felt the way he did, who studied ways to contradict history.” Go-getters. Strivers. Showing Cosey’s resort as a place for the black elite to segregate itself from the masses, Morrison teases out how a vanguard’s prosperity does not materially benefit the collective.

In some cases, that prosperity is gained at the collective’s direct expense. In The Wedding, the Coles family has made its fortune by wringing usurious rents from Harlem’s Great Migrators, and in a moment of acute guilt the slumlord matriarch reflects on her victims: “I spent the day in a nightmare. I watched a parade of dead souls. They had died in my houses,” she says. “But others kept coming up from the South looking to claim their piece of the promised land. My houses stayed full. My profits never fell.” She plowed those profits into a spacious house that anchors the Oval, a group of homes that constitutes an esteemed slice of the black summer society on Martha’s Vineyard.

Still, The Wedding is compelling to some because of its portrayal of what has come to be known as black excellence. As Oprah Winfrey explained when she adapted the book for a TV audience in 1998, she was drawn to The Wedding because “it shows a world that most people have rarely seen, a world where black families are all highly educated” and “very successful.” That world held particular interest for West. She recalled in a 1971 column for the local Vineyard Gazette that her family was part of an initial wave of black vacationers on Martha’s Vineyard. Some of her short stories, collected in 1995 in The Richer, the Poorer, paint the picture of that low-key environment: a little boy tries to find a made-up bird, a woman tries to maintain proprieties as an acquaintance grows increasingly ill. In her essay “The Legend of Oak Bluffs,” also in the collection, West writes that “it was a fine accomplishment for these early comers to the island to own summer cottages, whatever their size, whatever their lack of inside conveniences.” Over time, though, her cohort of coolly Protestant Boston families were joined in Oak Bluffs by the Coles group of flashy, well-to-do black New Yorkers — “achievers,” she called them. “They worked hard and they played hard,” she wrote in the Vineyard Gazette column. The island went from a setting to a scene — one in which not all characters were welcome. In The Wedding, newcomer Lute McNeil can’t break into the ranks of the Oval, where he has managed to rent the home of an ailing resident. Though he has money, the whispers of his déclassé life in Boston — three daughters with three mothers either dead or out of the picture — are enough to throw the Ovalites into a tizzy. They scorn him and thwart his efforts to purchase a house. Even their hired help hesitates to socialize with his. “You can never ever buy background,” Shelby’s mother seethes at Lute in the Oprah adaptation. “You can’t rent breeding.”

Such exclusionary thinking was equally on display in 1999, when Lawrence Otis Graham published the best-selling Our Kind of People, a tell-all guide to the world of the black elite. Graham gleefully uses interviews and memoir to point out the anxieties that build up among the denizens of black resort communities, among them the fear of encroachment of poorly assimilating newcomers. “They think they’re fitting in,” one summerer scoffs at a gaggle of black day-trippers on Martha’s Vineyard, “but they are clearly not our kind of people.” Though the book studies black elites in different settings, its 2021 television adaptation, co-produced by Karin Gist and Lee Daniels, is set just in Oak Bluffs. (In one dramatic scene, the show’s lead is denied admission to a black ladies’ society.)

Two years later, the series was followed by a reality TV show set in the same milieu. Summer House: Martha’s Vineyard has all the hallmarks of both the Bravo reality and black resort microgenres: a facade of polished striving thrown in front of a gurgle of anxious status seeking. When the show’s production staff went to the Oak Bluffs select board to get filming permits for a black spin-off, one black Vineyarder stood up in the meeting and tsk-tsked the idea. “This program is a horrible reflection of Martha’s Vineyard and Oak Bluffs,” she said, according to the Vineyard Gazette. Worried about the types who might be drawn to the island by that reflection, she said, “I am concerned about my property value.” In the show, from the moment the cast arrives on the island, they play into the stereotypes of black resort life that they hope to embody, hyped to take their place among the island’s black upper crust. In one episode, during which the cast visits the Vineyard’s African American Heritage Trail, their guide asks if they’ve read The Wedding. They’re stumped. No one has read it. They haven’t even seen Oprah’s made-for-TV adaptation.

Silas, who works in finance, touts his affiliation with the talented-tenth Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity — W.E.B. Du Bois was an honorary member; Martin Luther King Jr. pledged — as well as his status as half of the cast’s only married couple to establish himself as the leader of the house. But when his wife, Jasmine, who once had to live out of her car, breaks from her dutiful housewife routines by preparing an unsatisfactory breakfast, burning his pants with an iron, and daring to express her discontent, he dangles divorce. He explicitly threatens to withhold the respectability of marriage from her for tarnishing his patriarchal Race Man image. Still, the allure of their lifestyle seems to keep her bought in. “Black excellence is everything,” she says at one point, with great emphasis. “At the end of the day, that’s all I give a fuck about.” What matters to them is the narrative of excellence, with the black resort as a backdrop, and things get nasty when that narrative is interrupted.

 

The literature of the black resort takes pains to show that the kind of black excellence on offer at such places is stuck in a white supremacist logic. In Love, even the excluded locals take pride in Cosey’s accomplishments, yet, as Morrison shows, integration begins to undo his efforts. By the sixties, when the whites-only hotel owners had begun, by force of law or greed, to acknowledge that black money is green, too, Cosey’s resort starts emptying out. His daughter-in-law comes to hold the civil rights movement in disdain because it “destroyed her family and its business.”

Even as the black resort persisted through integration, it remained resistant to liberatory streams of black politics that were coursing through America. In the 1994 film The Inkwell, set in 1976, ex-Black Panther Kenny visits his sister at her Oak Bluffs summer home and bristles at the exclusivity of their surroundings. Spencer, his black Republican brother-in-law, teases Kenny about his politics. “Isn’t this what your struggle was all about? Huey and Bobby? An-gela?” Spencer asks, gesturing around during a trip to the beach. Kenny fumes. “And what about the black folks who weren’t allowed to make it? Where’s their Inkwell?” he asks. Spencer shrugs and offers: “Coney Island?” In his head, and in the heads of many others, the black community at the Inkwell is the result of a lot of hard work, the fulfillment of the American dream, the reward for making it. It doesn’t quite matter to Spencer that his own version of making it might not stand in for universal black success.

By the 1980s depicted in Sag Harbor, the Panther movement has waned, and the so-called post-soul generation is beginning to feel out its own ethnic path through the wake of the civil rights movement. One of Benji’s friends, adopting a revolutionary pose, “comes back to the Sag from his sophomore year of high school with a new, clipped pronunciation of the word whitey, and a fondness for using the phrases ‘white-identified’ and ‘false consciousness’ while watching The Cosby Show.” Eager to telegraph their resistance to a black elite they see as hewing too closely to white culture, Benji and his friends try on the slang, fashions, and music they associate with the “Street” — “Street being the antidote to Upper Middle Class emasculation,” Whitehead writes. The aesthetics and projected politics of the “Street” are antithetical to the ethos of the black resort.

 

Today, many black resorts are shadows of their former selves; the vacationers who remain do their best to preserve their pieces of history, but towns like Idlewild and Highland Beach now serve more as sites of memory than as active tourist destinations. In Idlewild especially, homes were abandoned after integration, and some of the businesses have become derelict, despite efforts at preservation. The “Black Eden,” as it was once known, had fallen.

Even strongholds like Oak Bluffs and SANS are under threat. In the 2023 novel Summer on Sag Harbor, Sunny Hostin’s second in a series of beach reads that take place in historic black resort towns, the decline of these spaces is the central conflict. The book is set in the summer after the George Floyd protests, when “Sag Harbor’s formerly tight-knit community of black elites was being threatened by developers who preyed on vulnerable, elderly homeowners” and families desperate for post-pandemic cash infusions. From 2009 to 2021, one character observes, SANS went from being 100 percent black to only 65 percent black. The novel’s protagonist, an investment banker named Olivia Jones, is “far from a revolutionary,” but she can recognize the pattern: “It was the same story in so many formerly predominantly black neighborhoods in the city — from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Harlem,” she observes. Fueled by the unsettled energies that might have driven other black elites into mutual aid work or the Diversity Equity Inclusion industrial complex, she gets involved in an organizing drive to keep the neighborhood out of the hands of whites. Nevermind that it’s an elite haven she’s struggling to protect.

For most of the novel, Olivia and her fellow organizers try to highlight the area’s historical and cultural significance. Joel Whittingham, the community’s “unofficial mayor,” recounts how Langston Hughes wrote poetry on his parents’ porch. “I think he wanted to refill his well, just like everyone else,” Mr. Whittingham says, in a succinct summary of the pitch for black resort towns. “But the unique thing about Sag Harbor is that he could truly rest among people who looked like him.” In the same scene, he also brags about his “dear friend, Colin Powell” (George W. Bush’s black secretary of state, who whitewashed the My Lai massacre, helped oversee the invasion of Grenada to topple its socialist government, and, most famously, lied to the United Nations to build support for America’s invasion of Iraq). Though Hostin seems relatively unconflicted about the ideal of the black resort — for her, these spaces represent an uncomplicated good, a genuine achievement — in her reference to Powell, she unintentionally clarifies the conservative undertow of the black resort as a political project. Near the novel’s close, Olivia decides she’s going to “create a company” that will fight development “through education, financial literacy programs, and cultural events.” Her goal, now, is to “avoid the destruction of historically black neighborhoods and cities.” Mr. Whittingham compares this effort to the civil rights movement. Are they sincere? Of course. But Olivia is also correct that there’s nothing “revolutionary” afoot — that Sag Harbor, or any other black resort, is not about change, but about a certain kind of privileged stasis.

 

In Great Expectations, David spots on his Vineyard host’s bookshelf a paperback copy of E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, a slim 1957 volume dedicated to unpacking the cultural politics of the black middle class. Frazier positions that group as isolated from the rest of the race’s struggles, its members modeling their aspirations on white paradigms of prestige and consumption. “Despite the tinsel, glitter, and gaiety of the world of make-believe in which middle-class Negroes take refuge, they are still beset by feelings of insecurity, frustration, and guilt,” Frazier writes. Cunningham doesn’t point out the irony of the book’s presence on Karen Cox’s shelf beyond noting that her copy is “frayed,” as if it has been a constant source of reference. Or perhaps a fetish for moments of reckoning? When Karen gives David a tour of the island, she exhibits a squirming pride about her status that Frazier would have had a field day analyzing. “We’re not like some of these people, you know, la-di-da,” she says. “At least we weren’t born that way. But look at us.”

Still perusing Karen’s bookshelf, David also finds her copy of The Wedding. Thumbing through, he notices that West dedicated the book to Jackie Onassis, who was her editor at Doubleday. David considers this a “little flash of fate,” because “the Senator reminded people of JFK.” The candidate’s political potential, David thinks, comes in part from his ability to assuage racial anxieties, his black-resort-brushed image that makes it feel good “to see Camelot in a guy who wasn’t white.” Pulling up to an event in Oak Bluffs, the candidate looks more relaxed than he has at any point in the book — “loose and untutored; his skinny frame swathed in a baggy white polo and a pair of sun-spotted chinos” — and more relaxed than we’ll ever see him again.

Of course, the real Obama not only fundraised at the Vineyard, as the fictional Senator does; he also continues to seek refuge there. In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama briefly discusses his time on the Vineyard, where he was welcomed into the fold years before his national political debut by longtime summerer Valerie Jarrett. After that, he began renting a house in Oak Bluffs for short trips every other summer. “The place had a quiet beauty and unhurried vibe that suited us,” he writes. “We appreciated, as well, the Vineyard’s history.” Once president, Obama traded the ferry for Marine One and rented a bigger estate with room for Secret Service and staff. Summers on the Vineyard were a decidedly joyless experience for his daughters, part of the generation who will be responsible for keeping the flame of the black resort alive: “Arrangements were made for us to go to a private beach, empty for a mile in either direction,” Obama explains. “Our bike rides now followed a tightly prescribed loop, which the girls rode exactly once to indulge me before declaring it ‘kind of lame.’” Post-presidency, Obama bought a 29 acre, seven bedroom, $11.75 million Vineyard estate where he still cloisters himself for part of the year, away from politics.

As his ferry makes its way toward the Vineyard, David remembers a school lesson about how water in black literature always calls back to slavery and the Middle Passage. But he wonders if maybe the water is just water, “no bodies, no voices, nothing: just an illegible motion away from the city.” It’s hard to imagine that the members of the black resort class ever truly forget who they are or where their people come from, no matter how much physical and spiritual distance they put between themselves and the places where they’ve earned their leisure. Still, reaching a stratum as precarious as theirs requires a great deal of compromise, a compromise David strains to comprehend. He closes his sojourn on the Vineyard asking what Dorothy West must have thought about Mary Jo Kopechne’s drowning in Ted Kennedy’s car on Chappaquiddick, to what extent it had “troubled her idea of her hidden-away home.” Maybe there is a dark side to this dream, Cunningham suggests. This lifestyle might swallow you up before you can enjoy its fruits.

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Reading Oneself

There are at least two Sylvia Plaths. One was born on October 27, 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Boston. This Sylvia Plath summered on the Massachusetts coastline and loved to swim. She was obsessed with baking; interested in mythology; equally determined and ambitious when it came to losing her virginity, getting straight A’s, and publishing in The New Yorker. She was a star literature student at Smith College, when she also tried to commit suicide, an experience that would inspire her novel The Bell Jar. As a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, she met and married the English poet Ted Hughes. This union lasted seven years, until Plath discovered Hughes’s infidelity, and he abandoned her to loneliness and despair in a London flat during one of the coldest English winters on record. Weeks after the January 1963 publication of The Bell Jar, in a now-famous death scene, Plath gassed herself in the kitchen while her two young children slept in the next room. She left behind a completed manuscript for Ariel, the poetry collection that would make her name. Because she died intestate, the rights to her work went to her next of kin: Hughes himself. He published the book — not before reordering the manuscript and removing a handful of poems he deemed too personal — and the world went wild.

On February 11, 1963, the other Sylvia Plath was born: the object of critical study and public fascination who, in the words of the critic Jacqueline Rose, “haunts our culture.” The relatively new movement of confessional poetry claimed her as its avatar in the 1960s, and amid the concurrent rise of women’s liberation and feminist literary criticism in the ’70s, her writing was rebranded as a form of political activism against patriarchy. The seemingly never-ending stream of Plath books and biographies that began to emerge after her death includes Linda Wagner-Martin’s Sylvia Plath (1987); Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991); Paul Alexander’s Rough Magic (1991); Carl Rollyson’s American Isis (2013); and most recently, Heather Clark’s Red Comet (2020), which, like many of its predecessors, is characterized by its dutiful if hopeless attempt to rescue Plath from her own afterlife. 

But Plath’s singular place in American literary culture is most clearly exemplified by the third figure who stalks these two Plaths: the Plath reader. In popular movies, TV shows, and books, Plath’s writing and her biography are collapsed into a shorthand that marks the Plath reader as a tortured teenage girl, doomed by her own adolescence and burgeoning sexuality. In the 1988 cult classic film Heathers, for example, reading Plath is an indication of death, pure and simple: after discovering the Cliffs Notes for The Bell Jar lying on Heather Chandler’s coffee table, her homicidal peers mask her murder as a suicide. Rory Gilmore of Gilmore Girls suggests Plath as a subject for her college application essay, but her mother replies that this “might send the wrong message,” a message Rory understands as “the sticking her head in the oven thing.” The cliche of Plath as angel-of-death has become so entrenched in the collective imagination that it has even been used as marketing copy: Publishers Marketplace recently reported a book deal for a novel, slated for release in 2025, in which two young women “become obsessed with a campus legend surrounding the deaths of Sylvia Plath-adoring sad girls.” 

Thanks in part to this pop-cultural image of Plath’s common reader, a certain stigma persists regarding Plath’s critical reader. The female Plath critic is always suspected of using the professional pursuit of literary scholarship to mask her inner teenage fangirl, who is more compelled by the dirty details of Plath’s life and death than by the writing itself. In her new book Loving Sylvia Plath, the scholar Emily Van Duyne writes that “Outing yourself as a voracious and loving reader of Sylvia Plath means joining a long discourse that sees you as a frivolous and unstable consumer of serious poetry, poetry you will never understand if you read it through the lens of Plath’s biography.” Van Duyne aims to vindicate an approach to Plath that centers emotion, particularly love, by way of an imagined attachment between Plath and her reader. 

In its emphasis on attachment, Loving Sylvia Plath joins a trendy group of books that blend criticism, biography, and memoir to foreground the author’s personal identification with a dead writer. Perhaps the best-known example is Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014), which interweaves Mead’s own life story with those of George Eliot, the characters in Middlemarch, and even a handful of the novel’s historical readers. Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020), by contrast, focuses hardly at all on McCullers’s writing; instead, it follows Shapland as she investigates the hidden history of McCullers’s love affairs with women, research that sheds light on Shapland’s own sexuality. And in A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again (2023), Joanna Biggs expands the concept to cover a larger group — with a chapter each on Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante — reading their lives and work in the context of her own recent divorce.

Three distinct but related types of identification are at play in this genre, which we might call auto-criticism: the author’s personal identification with a character, her identification with the writer at hand, and her identification of that writer’s life with her work. (This last type is also known as biographical criticism.) In exploring these varied kinds of identification as methods for reading, auto-criticism responds to an academic tradition that, broadly speaking, scorns them all. Yet the impulse toward identification and love — whereby affect replaces interpretation — ultimately reinforces the anti-intellectual notion that there is no place for critical thinking in the public sphere. In reclaiming novels and poems by way of identification, auto-criticism cheapens the very texts it claims to champion. The method of reading on display in these books not only risks a vast oversimplification of a writer’s particular literary achievement, but also comes at the expense of interpretive possibility, which lives precisely in the space of difference between a reader and a writer, and between the writer and her text. That women writers bear the special burden of this kind of criticism is not a break with tradition, but rather an extension of the long historical association of women writers with feeling instead of thought.

 

Auto-critics tend to characterize themselves as recovering English majors, and each has a bone to pick with her elite university education. “I was studying English literature because I loved books,” Mead recalls, “but I soon discovered that love didn’t have much purchase when it came to our studies.” She condemns “the era of critical theory” during which she studied at Oxford, writing how, under the influence of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and feminism, books “weren’t supposed merely to be read, but to be interrogated, as if they had committed some criminal malfeasance.” Biggs, another Oxford alum, sums up the intertwined modes of identification under the tongue-in-cheek term naive reading. “I knew that the way I identified with Dorothea wasn’t something I was supposed to use when writing essays,” she explains. “The biggest taboo during my degree was to wonder about the sort of person a writer was from the novels they wrote.” 

Van Duyne mostly eschews memoir, but, like Biggs and Mead, she frames her project through an opposition between identification and high literary culture. In university, Mead and Biggs both feel embarrassed by their love, surely in no small part because such a personal approach to reading is distinctly female. Traditional literary scholarship has aligned itself with a male-coded impersonality ever since T.S. Eliot coined his “impersonal theory of poetry.” In his landmark essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot declared that poetry is “not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” He was prescribing an antidote to the sentimentality of the Romantics and Victorians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the period in which, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “The middle-class woman began to write.” Eliot’s masculinist doctrine of steely impersonality constituted the ideological basis of New Criticism, a movement that Van Duyne singles out for critique. The New Critics championed close reading, an interpretive approach that emphasizes the formal properties of language, rather than consideration of historical or biographical context. The fundamental premise of close reading is that attention to language and form opens a text up, yielding multiple layers of significance. But Van Duyne condemns New Criticism as narrow-minded rather than open, writing that it “held that a poem was a singular, self-contained thing, and to bring historical or biographical details into it was to destroy the aesthetic experience of reading.” For Van Duyne, close reading is especially criminal when it comes to an author like Plath, whose writing dovetails so closely with her personal history. “This way of reading was, and is, employed like a weapon against readers of Sylvia Plath,” she writes, “many of whom saw in her poetry not only Plath’s life story, but their own.” Seen in this light, auto-criticism can be a self-conscious feminist affirmation of affect as a critical principle.

Auto-criticism doesn’t necessarily require a rejection of the university; Shapland and Van Duyne both have advanced degrees, and the emotional impulses of auto-criticism reflect a turn taking place within the academy itself, as well as outside it. “We’re certainly witnessing a dramatic surge of interest in alternatives to critique,” Rita Felski noted in an interview with The Los Angeles Review of Books in 2019. With her books The Limits of Critique (2015) and Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020), Felski has emerged as perhaps the most notable practitioner of postcritique, a school of thought that seeks to bridge the methodological gap between the literary critic and the common reader. In criticizing critique, Felski, much like Van Duyne, points to its essential irony: that the posture of cool impersonality and critical distance is itself a “mood” and a “form of attachment.” But this, after all, is not such an original observation. Even T.S. Eliot well knew that critics are always writing from a particular subject position. His line about poetry as “an escape from personality” is followed by a qualification: “But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” Impersonality can only ever exist in relation to personality; writing comes not from one or another of the two, but from the interaction between them. There are plenty of examples of criticism throughout the twentieth and 21st centuries that openly manifest symptoms of personal attachment, yet discover no conflict between such emotion and the practice of critical analysis (D.A. Miller’s gemlike Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, an impassioned deconstruction of Austen’s narrative voice, is one such example). As the critic Leo Robson recently noted, in diagnosing a “stultifying division between naive, emotional reading and rigorous, critical reading,” Felski is “seeking to fill a non-existent vacuum” between the two modes. 

Writing of Felski’s earlier feminist criticism, the renowned poetry scholar Helen Vendler opined that “The only thing wrong with all this, from my point of view, is calling it ‘aesthetics,’ when it should properly be called the sociology of literature.” The question of how much of oneself one is meant to bring to the act of reading is similarly more sociological than it is aesthetic, insofar as it speaks less to problems of interpretation than it does to a deeper anxiety about the use of literary criticism, its relevance and place in the public sphere. The postcritical turn cannot be understood outside of the context of the crisis in the humanities, and the supposedly diminishing returns of a life devoted to studying literature. This anxiety is at play in auto-critical texts that make a case for how the novels of the past can teach us about ourselves. “It’s hardly an enlarging experience to read a novel as if it were a mirror of oneself,” Mead acknowledges, but “identification with character is one way in which most ordinary readers do engage with a book, even if it is not where a reader’s engagement ends.” Her book, then, seeks to vindicate identification in the name of the “ordinary reader,” reflecting the auto-critic’s bid for literature’s relevance in the world outside the academy. But who is the audience for such a sermon, if not readers already convinced of the message? (Mead’s personal history of Middlemarch could only appeal to someone previously familiar with Middlemarch itself.) What this tension — and the constant litany of books about books, books about rediscovering books — reveals is nothing less than the wholesale (and wholly depressing) shrinkage of the literary world.

 

The particular species of naive reading localized around identification posits the reader’s own subject position as the central determinant of a text’s meaning. In an early passage, Mead lays out her personal ars poetica: that “Books gave us a way to shape ourselves — to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be.” She writes that at school,

My friend Sarah, who had swinging blonde hair and long tanned legs, came in one day having discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because of her I read and loved Tender Is the Night, and now when I come to Fitzgerald’s description of Nicole Diver, with her brown legs and her ‘thick, dark, gold hair like a chow’s,’ it’s Sarah I see. A quiet, intense girl called Kate whose brown hair fell in a heavy braid down her back, and who seemed weighted with mystery and sadness, urged Virginia Woolf upon me. I read To the Lighthouse and The Waves and admired them while being sure I was missing more than I was understanding, which was exactly how I felt about Kate. 

This triangulation — between Mead, her friends, and the books they read — embodies the implicit structure of the identificatory model at play in auto-criticism. Mead herself is the “friend” who, by imagining herself into the life of a writer — or rather, by imagining that life onto her own — enables a relationship between that writer (i.e., Eliot) and Mead’s own reader (i.e., me). She is not so much an interpreter or translator of the writer as she is another figure for her. 

Mead’s anecdote about her friends is elegantly articulated and rings true: surely all avid child readers will carry some such associations with particular books throughout their lives. But what kind of information might the reader extract from this association, beyond the general idea that Woolf’s writing is sad, and Fitzgerald’s sexy? The mapping of the friends onto the books demonstrates the problem of the genre in miniature: the presumption of a direct relationship between art and life, particularly when it comes to the woman writer. Sarah is identified with Nicole Diver, a fictional character invented by Fitzgerald, but in Kate, the distinction between Woolf and Woolf’s novels seems to fall apart. One can only hope that Kate was not compelled to drown in the River Ouse by the weight of the association that she carried — a heavy burden indeed. 

Auto-critical texts posit an absolute parallelism between critic and subject. This is the pattern of auto-criticism, writ large: I am 38, Mary Wollstonecraft was 38 (Biggs). I am a stepmother, George Eliot was a stepmother (Mead). I am a lesbian, Carson McCullers was a lesbian (Shapland). I am a victim of an abusive relationship, Sylvia Plath was a victim of an abusive relationship (Van Duyne). Mead and Biggs present their methodology as a return to their source material. In taking up literature not as an object of study but rather as a playbook for living, they both quote George Eliot’s famous maxim that “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” Yet the application of this principle within auto-criticism falters, as the act of identification ends up privileging precisely one’s “personal lot.” 

This confusion of motive is evident in Biggs’s chapter on Eliot. She writes that “I don’t want to ‘admire’ writing for its erudition, I want to be changed by it,” and then clarifies, “I want to know what it’s like to be someone else.” But her reading of Eliot’s great novel culminates thus: “I could see that the younger me was no better than Dorothea, Casaubon, Lydgate, or Rosamond in Middlemarch, who believe that getting married will solve their problems. If I didn’t think I was good enough, how would marriage solve that? OK, someone liked me enough to marry me but could that even get through if I didn’t like myself?” As noble a goal as self-love might be, it is quite distinctly not the lesson learned by any of the abovementioned characters. Eliot’s writerly gifts were many, but subtlety did not number among them, and she took care to make the moral of her story abundantly clear. Dorothea’s key revelation, arriving near the end of the novel, is of “the largeness of the world” and her inextricable part in “that involuntary, palpitating life.” Biggs wants “to know what it’s like to be someone else” and yet the function of Middlemarch, in her life, is to help her know herself better.

This truth is evidenced by the sentence-level structure of her book, which privileges Biggs’s first-person perspective in statements that invariably yoke emotion to vagueness: “I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand,” and “There is a part of me disappointed in Zora,” and “I struggle with knowing about Beauvoir’s repeated relationships with people younger than and overawed by her.” While claiming all eight women writers as avatars of female independence, Biggs nevertheless stands in judgment over their failure to live up to anachronistic feminist principles. “I am sometimes disappointed with Eliot’s reluctance to speak up,” she writes. “But I can forgive her almost anything for writing Middlemarch.” This is a characteristic observation on her part, insofar as it tells the reader nothing about either Eliot or her novel, only what Biggs feels about them.

Of the group mentioned here, Shapland is the most clear-sighted about the contingency of the parallel she seeks between herself and the true lesbian Carson McCullers. As she sorts through letters in the McCullers archive at the Harry Ransom Center, Shapland unearths evidence of McCullers’s love affairs with women, which have historically been suppressed or denied by the author’s biographers and critics. This discovery ultimately enables Shapland to fully accept her own queer identity. But in some sense, she reaches an impasse: “When I found what I was looking for, I had no clue what to do with it.” This is a problem for auto-criticism more broadly: what is there “to do” with the fruits of literary identification, beyond the merely personal confirmations and the support they might offer? 

It’s telling that this particular mode of identification is so often employed by women writers, about women writers. There are exceptions, many of which feature titular activities and animating emotions rather more masculine than love — John Kaag’s Hiking with Nietzsche, or Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, for instance. The female auto-critic’s implicit presumption is that her subject invites such a method of reading-through-feeling because she is a woman, too. “They ask questions of me, they push me, they comfort me,” Biggs writes of her eight female subjects. “They are most alive in their writing, but at their graves I’m reminded that they were just mortal, and I remember again that they’re only women.” 

In Loving Sylvia Plath, Van Duyne claims identification as an explicitly feminist project. Indeed, the subtitle of the book is “A Reclamation”: but reclamation from whom? Van Duyne argues that the condemnation of Plath fandom is inherently misogynistic, because it devalues women readers who identify with Plath’s experiences of mental illness and patriarchal oppression. It’s true that Ted Hughes dismissed Plath’s (mostly female) readers ​​as “a sensation-watching and half-hysterical congregation,” a description that echoes Harold Bloom’s diagnosis of Plath as “an absurdly bad and hysterical verse writer.” Still, Hughes’s characterization does fit a particular subset of Plath devotees and superfans, such as the vandals who chiseled the name “Hughes” off of her headstone so relentlessly that it had to be removed from the graveyard and replaced. And Van Duyne shows her hand early on, when she compares Princess Diana, with her “coltish legs and sly smile,” to Plath. While Van Duyne implies they were both “trapped, alone, far from home,” there is no legitimate comparison to be made between these two figures, unless you are comparing the fandoms that worship them simply because they are eternally young, beautiful, and dead. 

Van Duyne writes of the academy’s disparaging attitude toward the Plath lover-critic that “there is an irony there that begs to be interrogated, since so much foundational critical work on Plath was completed by her husband, male colleagues, and lovers.” In addition to Hughes, the poet Stephen Spender (an acquaintance who once awarded her a literary prize), her teacher Robert Lowell, and her college boyfriend Peter Davison, Van Duyne refers to the writer and critic Al Alvarez, a friend of Plath and Hughes who published a memoir relating hitherto unpublished facts about Plath’s suicide. According to Van Duyne, none of these men “acknowledged the possibility that, far from a necessary critical distance, the personal animus they bore toward Plath showed up as critical animosity, one they projected onto her readers.” Van Duyne’s intervention in the historiography of Plath criticism is to suggest that early male critics demonized or dismissed biographical readings as they pretended to advocate for the poetry on its own terms, using the critical attitude of impersonality as a cover for what is actually the punishment of a successful woman poet. Van Duyne undermines her argument, however, by lumping Hughes in with a figure like Alvarez, who, far from insisting on an attitude of critical distance, initiated biographical criticism of Plath’s work by unveiling the gritty details of her marriage and death in the first place. 

By foregrounding her feelings for Plath — feelings of love, sympathy, and identification — Van Duyne is responding less to Hughes and Alvarez than she is to her shadow interlocutor: Janet Malcolm, whose 1993 book on Plath and Hughes titled The Silent Woman studies the publication and reception history of both Plath’s writing and writing about Plath, ultimately defending Hughes against his detractors. Though Van Duyne only engages Malcolm obliquely in Loving Sylvia Plath, in the 2021 introduction to her blog of the same name, she explains that her book was “born out of a flat out rejection of Miss-Janet-If-You’re-Nasty’s thesis.” According to Van Duyne, Malcolm divided Plath biographers into the “good” and the “bad.” Van Duyne writes, “You are good if you set to typing up the facts with the objectivity of a court stenographer; you are bad if you admit to even the barest fondness for your subject.” Van Duyne assumes that an impersonal perspective is by default unfeeling, yet she misunderstands Malcolm’s motivation entirely. Insofar as Malcolm takes Hughes’s side, she does so because she sympathizes with him. Contrary to what Van Duyne would have us believe, Malcolm is in fact uniquely preoccupied with emotions — it’s just that they are emotions other than her own. (Malcolm outright acknowledges that “Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness,” and a reader well-trained in suspicion by the critical attitude of The Silent Woman itself might even detect an emotion that goes deeper than sympathy within its pages. It is almost as though Malcolm was seduced by Hughes’s voice in the archives.) For Van Duyne, reading Plath through the lens of love rescues her, both from Malcolm’s supposed heartlessness and from others’ sexist animus masquerading as impersonality. But this tit-for-tat formulation fails to justify love as a serious critical method in its own right. Instead, Van Duyne simply reifies the false binary between affect and critique that she began by rebelling against.

 

“Why had I always felt that when it came to Sylvia Plath, I was being lied to?” Van Duyne asks. Her particular aim is to reconfigure our understanding of the Plath-Hughes marriage by arguing that it was shaped from beginning to end by domestic violence, and she reads Plath’s life, writing, and reception history in light of this thesis. Borrowing from the philosopher Miranda Fricker, she writes that she is performing “a kind of hermeneutical affirmative action” on Plath’s oeuvre. As Van Duyne explains, she reads Plath’s work as “on one level” a documentation of Hughes’s abuse, enacting an implicit axiom of auto-criticism. In order for a reader to identify with a writer’s life story, she must first see the writer’s work as a reflection of that life story. 

Responding to the slander of Plath’s biographical critics as unserious readers, Van Duyne writes that readers “had been cheated” out of “crucial details of the last few years of her life, which offered her poetry vital context.” Plath was a notoriously devoted documenter of her own life, but her journals covering late 1959 to early 1963 are missing; Hughes confessed to destroying one of them himself, while claiming that the other one mysteriously “disappeared.” In 2017, a cache of previously unseen letters written by Plath to her psychiatrist during this period emerged, and their contents suggested one reason why Hughes might have wanted the journals eradicated from the record. In the letters, Plath accuses Hughes of physical violence, blaming him for her 1961 miscarriage. Van Duyne argues that this should have come as no surprise, citing a series of feminist writers who had already claimed that Hughes was violent. These prior allegations “lent credence to my own belief,” Van Duyne continues, that Plath and Hughes had been in “a violent, controlling marriage.” The argument is finally a closed circuit — understanding Plath’s life helps us understand her poetry, which helps us understand her life — and the poetry points to one referent: domestic abuse. 

As with Biggs, Van Duyne’s very sentences foreground her own subjectivity, originating in abstract intuitions based on what “I felt in my heart.” She writes that “I felt distinctly that Plath’s late poetry was that of a survivor of intimate partner violence trying to feel her way into freedom.” This insistent closing down of Plath’s late poetry to a single, stable script — “that of a survivor of intimate partner violence” — is the structural twin of totalizing analyses like that of the critic Terry Castle, who wrote that Plath was simply “crazy,” and that her “insanity and horror were requisite for the overall vision” as “deep and inalienable sources of the poet’s fever dream.” Both Van Duyne’s and Castle’s formulations depend on the idea that the lyric subject speaks directly for the poet — that in writing of abuse, anger, and the atrophy of the heart, Plath wasn’t overstating the matter. She was speaking simply of her own experience (insanity or domestic abuse, she couldn’t possibly have been subject to both!) rather than to the projections, fantasies, and fascinations that live in all of us — and they really do, as her impassioned reception history so clearly demonstrates. 

Locating Plath at the troubled intersection of those doubles — form and feeling, impersonal and personal, art and life — illuminates the inadequacy of identification as a framework for reading her work. “I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured,” Plath said in a 1962 interview on the BBC. “I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience.” Certainly we should take seriously the suggestion that “being tortured” — psychically, physically, or both — was a part of Plath’s personal experience. So, it seems, was her own “madness.” We should take equally seriously the fact that her poetry was an explicit manipulation of these experiences, not a record of them. Only then will we see her not as Hughes’s Plath, nor as Van Duyne’s, but as something closer to herself. 

At stake in any discussion of Plath and her readers is the broader question of the relationship between language and identity, which Plath’s work thematizes. Do novels and poems reflect our interiority, or do they manufacture it? In a certain sense, the same question haunts the postcritical turn, which centers the surface of a reader’s emotional response in opposition to the ambiguities, contradictions, and unknowingness that live inside a text itself. Auto-criticism, and its identificatory principle in particular, is most fundamentally flawed in its false understanding of the directionality of reading. As Shapland briefly acknowledges in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, “feeling understood by someone does not equate to understanding them.” Yet one might go even further and venture that “feeling understood” is itself an illusion: the fantasy that books are echoes of our innermost depths and yearnings rather than constitutive of them. 

The tragic difference between writing and life means that, through the prism of her poetry, Plath remains opaque to her reader. We might, if we wish, use this opacity as the ground for our own projections and call it an act of love. But “Love is a shadow” (as Plath writes in “Elm”): a silhouette, an afterimage, a marker of absence. From across this “Pour of tor and distances” (“Ariel”) Plath might see us, read us, know us; but she will never love us back.