In the Preface of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (2024), the editor Peter K. Steinberg highlights that Plath’s short stories ‘have concerns with material wealth, poverty, depression, loneliness, and magic’ (Prose xvii). Steinberg’s acknowledgement of magic as a significant theme in Plath’s prose demonstrates the importance of revisiting and carefully considering the supernatural in her work. Magic was also one of the main themes of the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival in October 2022, celebrating Plath’s ninetieth birthday with events across Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall, and a topic of the poetry and essay collection After Sylvia (Nine Arches Press, 2022), edited by Sarah Corbett and Ian Humphreys. The present book, Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural, is the outcome of the recent and long history of public and scholarly attention to theorising Plath’s engagement with magic. I approach the subject with critical, literary, cultural, political, and gendered perspectives, passion for the subject, and consideration for Plath’s published and archival writings. This book brings an interdisciplinary approach to Sylvia Plath and the supernatural themes and retracts previous reductionist narratives on her engagement with the occult. The critical examination of Plath’s poetry, prose, and private writings demonstrates the influence of historical, cultural, political, and literary discourses and texts on the supernatural in Plath’s carefully crafted language. My study of the subject is centred on those aspects and interpretations of the supernatural that are central to Plath’s understanding and deployment of the concept within the cultural, historical, political, and gendered framework in which she lived – in post-war America and during the Cold War.

Throughout the seven chapters, I investigate what Plath might have meant by invoking or exploring the supernatural and the ways in which she employed its related concepts to articulate political and personal matters in her poetry, fiction and non-fiction and personal writings. This book is interested in the cultural models Plath draws on in her poetry and prose when she deploys concepts such as the witch, sympathetic magic, black magician, and a witches’ sabbath. For example, the concept of witchcraft – one of the several subcategories of the supernatural – is rooted in the early modern witch-hunt and its literature, which she was familiar with through her education in American literature and Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Plath had a varied and often contradictory engagement with the supernatural across different historical periods, classical to contemporary literature, and cultural frameworks. My close reading of her works also relies on the drafts of her poems and other writings from archives to further illustrate her extensive knowledge and deep interest in the supernatural and its themes. Yet Plath is not the only poet of her generation who utilised supernatural themes in her poetry: along with Plath’s writings, I examine the works of post-war poets who have been affiliated with Plath, such as Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes, and writers who are compared less often to Plath, such as Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bowen, Arthur Miller, John Berryman, John Ashbery, and Robert Graves, demonstrating the cultural, poetic, and political discourses and texts from which Plath sought inspiration.

In her often-used 1949 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (WCD), held at Smith College Special Collections (SCSC), Plath frequently underlined entries. Amanda Golden argues that ‘by considering Plath’s library and those of other writers, we learn that their annotating can be a means of engaging in larger conversations, responding to critical contexts and writers’ own social and political landscapes’ (‘Sylvia Plath’s Library’ Reference Golden, Anderson, Byers and Warner111). Thus, my focus on Plath’s annotations and marginalia reveals not only her knowledge of and emphasis on certain topics but also the cultural context in which she encountered texts and terms and responded to them in her writing. Plath’s dictionary defines the supernatural in three ways, of which I quote the first two relevant definitions:

The entry outlines the supernatural as a phenomenon beyond the human material world across different beliefs, cultures, and times. The second definition connotes a religious understanding of the supernatural in Western history and culture, mainly Christianity. I use the supernatural as an umbrella term, which covers wide-ranging topics from spectrality, religious miracles, and magic to witchcraft in Western thoughts. This book is interested in those interpretations and aspects of the supernatural that Plath engaged with in her prose and poetry and in the broader literary and cultural discourses and discussions. In colloquial speech, the lines between magic and witchcraft are often blurred. In the WCD, witchcraft is further defined as a ‘practice of witches’, a ‘power more than natural’; and magic is described as ‘the art which claims or is believed to produce effects by the assistance of supernatural beings or by a mastery of secret forces in nature’ (‘witchcraft’, ‘magic’). Like the dictionary definitions, Plath’s interpretation of these concepts was diverse. This book differentiates between the supernatural (meaning all that is beyond our perception of natural occurrences), witchcraft (the supernatural power associated with witches and the Devil), and magic (as a learnt supernatural power associated with magicians). These concepts, defined in WCD, are rooted in the vocabulary and history of the early modern witch-hunt, which provides a historical and theoretical framework for this book.

One of the objectives of Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural is to move away from the narrow understanding of Plath’s engagement with the supernatural, which has often focused on a sensationalised understanding of witchcraft, ignoring her well-informed knowledge of the broader subject. Biographers, such as Edward Butscher and earlier critics like M. L. Rosenthal, frequently labelled her poems witchy, diabolical, or occultist without unpicking these concepts. Recent critics, such as Heather Clark, draw attention to the fact that when women poets such as Sylvia Plath are writing about supernatural themes, they are often labelled as playing with ‘witchcraft, or quasi-occult practices’ (‘An Iconic Life’ Reference Clark3). Clark adds that the posthumous identification of Plath with the figure of a priestess or witch is patronising and sexist. Emily Van Duyne likewise affiliates the supernatural with Plath’s posthumous life, originating the labels in trauma and misogyny:

Van Duyne suggests that the supernatural has been weaponised against Plath and her work, concealing her authentic self and narrative. However, there is also textual evidence among the published and archival materials, drafts, correspondences, and journals that Plath engaged with the supernatural in various ways. This book unearths Sylvia Plath from the careless employment of demons, devils, witches, black magic and more, and contextualises concepts associated with the supernatural within their historical and cultural framework. I closely examine terminologies that critics, biographers, and non-specialist readers have equally deployed superficially on Plath for over six decades. Plath’s writings provide evidence of her broad understanding and knowledge of the history of witch-hunts, supernatural beliefs, religious terminologies, and the political rhetoric of the supernatural. The foundation of my analysis, subcategories of supernatural, and how I employ these terms is the well-defined and well-researched field of witchcraft and demonology, which comprises historical, textual, and discourse analyses interpreting the witch-hunt and its causes and outcomes. By relying on an interdisciplinary framework, I provide a new historical and cultural context for Plath studies and the broader field of twentieth-century literature.

The period of the great witch-hunt covers approximately three centuries; across Europe, it lasted roughly from 1450 to 1750. During this time, communities within most European countries and New England participated in prosecuting alleged witches. The emergence of a system to criminalise witchcraft was a long process, which developed from the religious fight of the Catholic Church against pagans and heretics. Inquisitorial punishments and prosecutions of heretics defined the medieval Crusades. In the early modern period, the crime of witchcraft was said to be characterised by maleficium, that is, harmful acts such as cursing and blaspheming and pacts with the Devil, who, according to contemporary Christian beliefs, gave magical powers to witches (Levack, The Witch-Hunt Reference Hughes7–Reference Hughes8). The fight against witches became more widespread after the Bull of Pope Innocent VIII issued in 1484, which called for the establishment of an ecclesiastical inquisition for the elimination of witchcraft. The Pope’s main advocates, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, wrote the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (1487), in which the Bull is reprinted. The misogynistic text codified the belief that midwives, and more generally women, were witches who killed infants and harmed men’s fertility. While historians remain critical of the status of Malleus Maleficarum, for example, J. A. Sharpe argues that the influence of the text has been overestimated (180), it resurfaced in twentieth-century feminist interpretations of the witch-hunt like Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1972) and in the works of second-wave radical feminists, such as Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology (1984), as a key source describing witches and their crimes. My book considers the religious and political context of the early modern witch-hunt and its interpretations in the post-war era – before the feminist reclamation of witches – to pin down Plath’s well-informed readings of the history and literature of witchcraft and its role in the political discourses of the post-war era.

The Salem witch trials were the most influential mass execution of witches in New England, which started in 1692 and ended in 1693. Plath knew of the witch trials from American literature and historical sources, while she also lived in close proximity to Salem village. During the series of trials, more than two hundred people had been accused of practising witchcraft, and nineteen were executed who lived in Salem village and neighbouring places. The mass accusation started with the fits, delusions, and convulsions of children who accused Samuel Parris’s slave Tituba who was from Barbados. Tituba confessed to being a witch but denied hurting the girls, snowballing a series of accusations, especially among women of the village community. Many of the accused were hanged or died in prison. More than four hundred years after the trials, there are still numerous questions about what could have happened with the children and why so many people were accused and executed. The Salem witch trials became part of national memory in America, often evoked during times of moral and cultural dilemmas, and represented a line between the superstitious, colonial past and the rational, modern, and independent America (Adams Reference Adams4–Reference Adams6). While historical studies originate the witch trials in community tensions, such as Stephen Nissenbaum and Paul Boyer’s Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1974), Salem remains a symbol of mass hysteria, delusion, and the abuse of institutional power. Such interpretation appealed to Plath who often sought inspiration from historical injustices and grew up in the 1950s in Massachusetts where the concept of the witch-hunt not only experienced a return in political discourses but the geography evoked the haunting parallels between anti-communism and the execution of witches.

As the fear of witches heightened across North America and Europe, the early modern period, magicians who practised ‘white magic’ – regarded as helpers and healers – could also be accused of performing diabolical magic (Levack, The Witch-Hunt Reference Hughes11). They were often known as ‘cunning men’, ‘wizards’, or ‘wise men/women’ (Thomas Reference Thomas210). The Protestant Reformation also wanted to eliminate Catholic protective magic, such as miracles, the canonisation of saints, and magical attributions to prayers, which increased the fear of magic among the peasant society (Levack, The Witch-Hunt Reference Hughes118). The popularity of cunning folk in the villages suggests that magic was perceived by ordinary people as fearful only when it was linked with the Devil and demonic activities. In early modern plays, we often see the opposition between the ‘good’ white magic, associated with the intellectual abilities of the magus, and ‘evil’ magic, related to a feminised understanding of witchcraft, as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Macbeth. While it would be an overstatement to say that magic and witchcraft reflect the gender binary in Western history and culture, the former is often linked to the male magus and the latter to the female witch. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 unpick the different references to the gendered elements of witchcraft and binary perception of good vs. evil magic in Plath’s writings and contextualise their meaning in the historical period in which they originate.

Despite the evidence of gendering witchcraft, most (male) historians during the twentieth century avoided analysing the gender power dynamics of the witch-hunt period, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1969) and Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), which focused on the social-economic and religious context of the witch-hunt. Studies of the witch-hunt, which engaged with gender imbalances, such as Christina Larner’s Enemies of God (1981), Carol Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987), Diane Purkiss’s The Witch in History (1996), and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004), became more widespread with the second- and third-wave feminist movements and the establishment of women’s and gender studies as an interdisciplinary academic field. The witch figure also emerged as a metaphor for women’s oppression during the second half of the twentieth century: in the late 1960s, the organisation W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) was founded, which drew on popular beliefs about and imagery of witches as powerful, wicked women who are part of a secret organisation (Purkiss Reference Purkiss8–Reference Purkiss9). As highlighted, radical feminists like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin reworked some unsubstantiated claims about the witch-hunt; they echoed the earlier sentiment that ‘wise women’ were regarded as the enemy of the Church because they healed while Christianity advocated suffering and emphasised the guilt of humanity, particularly of women (Gage Reference Gage74). Indeed, many women accused of committing witchcraft were midwives or healers; however, Daly and Dworkin overstated their persecution; rather, women were often victims of witch accusations due to their limited professional options (Levack, The Witch-Hunt Reference Hughes147). Plath’s writing alludes to these stereotypes, yet her knowledge of the witch-hunt shows a more nuanced understanding of the historical, literary, gender, and political aspects that constitute the witch.

Feminist revisionist mythology encouraged an interpretation of Plath’s use of witch imagery that focuses on the hierarchical gendered power dynamics. Writing about Plath’s and Sexton’s use of supernatural female figures, Alicia Ostriker argues that ‘when they traffic in the demonic, women poets have produced some of the most highly charged images’ (221). Poems like ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Witch Burning’ reference witches and present a similar narrative of rebirth through burning and transcendence in which the objectified and tortured female body is a central spectacle. The feminist interpretations of the poems tend to concern themselves with the socio-political context in which we read the poems and less with how Plath employed the witch imagery in her poetry of the 1950s and early 1960s when such concepts were diversely used and understood. As Susan Van Dyne highlights, Plath had conflicting ideas about gender, art, and embodying female personae in her poetry: ‘to become a poet, for Plath, means to resist becoming her gender’ (Revising Life Reference Van Dyne85). A central argument of Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural is that Plath’s portrayal of the witch is as a layered and multidimensional figure who embodies martyrdom, modern scapegoating and societal injustices, and maternal malice – more often than a proto-feminist sorceress. She often relied on her substantial knowledge of the witch-hunt, political rhetoric, and literary sources rather than a straightforward feminist stance.

Plath’s dictionary is one of the key sources in tracing her knowledge of the concepts of the witch and witchcraft. Below is the WCD’s definition of the witch, in which the underlining replicates Plath’s annotation:

Her highlights demonstrate that she emphasised the negative connotations of the witch figure, such as her association with black magic, her haggish look, and her ability to bewitch with spells. On the same page, the dictionary also included entries on ‘witch broom’, ‘witchcraft’, and ‘witches’ Sabbath’. WCD’s definition contextualises the concepts in the early modern witch-hunt and shows the highly gendered and sexist perception of witchcraft. The gendered portrayal of the witch, particularly as an old maternal figure, still defines our cultural representation of this supernatural figure. Plath’s depiction of witches in her poems like ‘Witch Burning’ and ‘The Disquieting Muses’ draws on varied sources, such as the historical witch-hunt, the literature of witchcraft, and political discourses, which I discuss in detail in Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 7. My book shows that witch figures and witchcraft are not employed as trans-historical symbols of female oppression by Plath, but she recognised the complex histories of the concepts rooted in the political and cultural frameworks of the European and New England witch-hunts, the McCarthyist witch-hunt, and literature concerned with witches and their powers.

Plath’s references to the supernatural in her poems, The Bell Jar, short stories, correspondence, journals, and archival materials frequently interrogate the relationship between gender and magical power. The majority of Plath’s archives are kept either in Smith College Special Collections (SCSC) or in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Critics such as Marjorie Perloff in ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)making Of The Sylvia Plath Canon’ (1984), Lynda K. Bundtzen in The Other Ariel (2005), and Susan Van Dyne in Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (1993) studied Plath’s manuscripts, particularly her Ariel poems. This book benefits from the handwritten drafts (holographs) and typewritten drafts (typescripts) of Plath’s poems: I examine the manuscripts to identify Plath’s deep-rooted poetic allusions to supernatural themes and employment of the vocabulary of the witch-hunt. Plath’s early manuscripts are often undated, however, as her writing process developed, she dated the poems, frequently adding her name on the top of the page. The Bell Jar and several of her later poems were written on the pink Smith memorandum paper Plath seized while teaching at Smith College in the 1957/58 academic year. Her journal entry from March 1958 suggests that she considered the pink paper inspiring and full of life, as opposed to the blankness of white paper (J 344). This book pays attention to the pattern in Plath’s creative writing process and interrogates her repeated erasures of expressions that directly deploy the imagery of witch prosecutions, sympathetic magic, diabolism, or reference the magic powers of spoken or written words. While Plath’s archives reveal a narrative of her knowledge of and interest in the supernatural, the Harriet Rosenstein Research Files on Sylvia Plath 1910–2018 at Emory University, opened in 2020, exposed controversial discussions on Plath’s alleged sorcery and apparent witchy poems in interviews five decades earlier. The archives constitute correspondences, audio files, and interview transcripts from Rosenstein, who was working on a Plath biography in the early 1970s; however, she abandoned her project, and her research materials were unseen until recently. The interview tapes and notes with Plath’s friends, neighbours, and acquaintances provide rich perspectives on how the discourse of Plath’s engagement with the supernatural emerged and shifted over the decades. The over-emphasis on her ‘witch’ identity, involvement in witchcraft, and rumoured practice of magic in the research files demonstrate that, in one way or another, the supernatural has always been an underlying theme in understanding Plath’s life and work. The critical examination of the discourse on Plath and the supernatural and the close reading of her personal, poetic, and discursive engagement with the topic is not only timely but needed to untangle what is being said and meant in these interview files, and what kinds of historical and cultural frameworks influenced Plath’s associations with popular ideas of witchcraft.

This book would not be a wide-ranging study of Sylvia Plath and the supernatural without the publication of new materials and the expansion of Plath studies. Most importantly, The Letters of Sylvia Plath vol. 1 (2017) and vol. 2 (2018), edited by Karen V. Kukil and Peter K. Steinberg; The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (2024), edited by Peter K. Steinberg, containing many of Plath’s non-fiction and journalistic writings; and the forthcoming The Poems of Sylvia Plath (2026) edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil. Without question, Heather Clark’s monumental biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2020), shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, had a great influence on reevaluating Plath’s place both in the wider public and academia, encouraging scholars to reexamine Plath’s life, work, and legacy. Recent edited publications reflect on this turn in Plath studies, including Sylvia Plath in Context (2019), edited by Tracy Brain, and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022), edited by Anita Helle, Amanda Golden, and Maeve O’Brien. In the latter collection, Katherine Robinson’s chapter, ‘The Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Sympathetic Magic’, signals the timely reconsideration and scholarly interest in Plath and the supernatural. Forthcoming edited collections, The Routledge Companion to Sylvia Plath, edited by Emily Van Duyne, Janet Badia, and Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, and The New Sylvia Plath Studies, under my editing with Cambridge University Press, offer new critical pathways, intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches, and popular reading practices of Plath’s work in the twenty-first century. The New Sylvia Plath Studies also includes my chapter, ‘Plath and the Diabolical Atomic Age’, an expansion of Chapter 4 of this book, focusing on an interdisciplinary study of Plath’s writings on the Cold War in which politics, science, and black magic were intertwined.

Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural parallels the scholarly activities and critical reassessment of supernatural themes, magical histories, and Western esotericism in literary studies and the humanities, such as Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (2010), Leigh Wilson’s Modernism and Magic (2013), and Revisiting the “Nazi Occult”: Histories, Realities, Legacies (2015), edited by Monica Black and Eric Kurlande. My book explores key concepts associated with the supernatural, which I read within the broader framework of post-war culture and politics. The seven chapters study how supernatural concepts have been deployed in literary, cultural, and political discourses and popular culture to establish Plath’s perception and employment of them in her writings. Apart from closely reading Plath’s writings, I look at the broader cultural conversations in, for example, newspapers and magazines. The media archives, read along with Plath’s non-fiction and journalistic writings, demonstrate that supernatural themes were embedded in the language, culture, and politics of post-war America and Britain and, more broadly, the Cold War. Plath’s education in classical myths and early modern plays, contextualised within the cultural framework in which she encountered them, gives evidence of her knowledge of the literature of witchcraft, supernatural beings, and magical powers. My book also deemphasises the role of Ted Hughes as an initiator and influence on Plath’s writings about the supernatural and considers the broader context of post-war American poetry, particularly the Boston poets such as Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell, who are regularly read along with Plath’s confessional-style poems. From Macbeth and Doctor Faustus to demonic possession and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Salem writings, post-war writers were interested and invested in the intersections between gender, magic, and power at larger societal levels and in interpersonal relationships. They engaged with the literary and political discourses and shared an intellectual interest in the supernatural.

The chapters of this book follow a thematic structure, moving from politics to literary discourses, examining the different geographical and historical discourses and cultural frameworks with which Plath engaged. Chapter 1 contextualises the socio-political framework in which Plath encountered the concept of the witch-hunt, particularly focusing on the legacies of the Salem witch trials in American history, politics, and literature. Late 1940s and early 1950s America was characterised by McCarthyism, which revived the concept of the witch-hunt, describing the prosecution of ‘witches associated metaphorically with communists and subversion of other kinds’ (Gibson, Rediscovering Renaissance Witchcraft Reference Ferretter99). Discussing the deployment of the witch-hunt in post-war America as an abuse of institutional power, this chapter discusses Plath’s poems and prose on surveillance during the Cold War and reads The Bell Jar in conversation with Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible (1953) in their shared interest in nonconformist women during the different witch-hunts in America. I also assess Plath’s extensive knowledge of the witch trials and the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables in her writings. Some of Plath’s poems, such as ‘Witch Burning’, explicitly draw on the early modern witch-hunt and demonstrate her well-informed knowledge of the literature of witchcraft and the way in which the concept of witch-hunt informed political debates in mid-twentieth-century America.

Moving on from the historical witch-hunt, Chapter 2 centres on Plath’s metaphorical employment of the concept for which I close read two Ariel poems and short stories from the late 1950s. Plath’s poems reveal her distrust in male authority figures, from clerics to doctors, building a parallel between the power dynamics of religious and political persecutions of the medieval and early modern periods and the authoritarian politics of World War II and the Cold War. While Plath was aware of the explicit gender element of the witch-hunt, for her, the historical witch figure functions as an embodiment of the marginalised and prosecuted groups with whom she expressed sympathy. This chapter discusses Plath’s engagement with martyrdom and religious prosecutions during the Cold War in her short stories, such as ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ and poems like ‘Lady Lazarus’. Looking at the early drafts, this chapter reveals the expressive language and metaphor of witch prosecutions in ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Fever 103°’, which she later abandoned or deleted from her manuscripts. Plath’s poetic language mimics the rhetoric of the Cold War, where references to the witch prosecutions were frequent: even Ethel Rosenberg, the victim of McCarthyism, compared herself to the martyr Joan of Arc who is often evoked in Plath’s late poetry. Looking beyond the feminist interpretations of the witch, this chapter establishes Plath’s Cold War poetics and politics as a metaphorical deployment of the witch prosecutions. Plath uses the gendered body as a site of the institutional and authoritarian violence of World War II and the Cold War, seeking inspiration from the power imbalance of the witch-hunt period and Joan of Arc’s martyrdom.

Chapter 3 moves to the literary influences in Plath’s writings, focusing on the gendered understanding of the witch and the magician, which often aligns with her portrayal of parental relationships. The chapter traces Plath’s employment of maternal and paternal magic influenced by Shakespearean supernatural figures. Macbeth’s Weird Sisters appear in Plath’s writings as sinister, hag-like figures whose inescapable presence influences the speaker’s fate, originating their power from mythological female figures. In some of her writings, the trio of supernatural female figures materialise as spectral maternal figures and a sinister hag-head with paralysing powers. In ‘The Disquieting Muses’, she merges the fairy-tale witch into the Weird Sisters as a representation of maternal malice to express ambiguous feelings towards her mother. In contrast to Macbeth’s witches, the influence of The Tempest has been highlighted by previous criticisms of Plath’s poetry, which I discuss in more detail later. I establish a parallel between Prospero’s magical power and the father figure’s beekeeping: some of Plath’s bee poems and short stories, such as ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ and ‘Among the Bumblebees’ express her likening of her father’s beekeeping to a magical power. In other poems, like ‘Full Fathom Five’, Plath draws on the larger-than-life presence of the father-magician whose power is desirable yet inaccessible to the speaker. The chapter demonstrates that for Plath, The Tempest functioned as a metaphor for her childhood seascape in which the Prosperoean father is exiled to the island where his power and knowledge are represented by magic. The supernatural figures from Shakespeare’s plays express a gendered binary understanding of magic and power, which influenced Plath’s writings on her ambiguous parental relationship.

Alongside Shakespeare’s plays, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus functioned as an early modern literary influence on Plath’s writings. Chapter 4 centres on the concepts of demonic possession and demonology portrayed in Marlowe’s play and Goethe’s Faust as retellings of the Faust legend. Building on Golden’s interpretation of marginalia in Annotating Modernism (2021), I look at Plath’s annotations of the plays in her books and read them along with her poems that reference the plays. The supernatural concepts from Doctor Faustus and Faust aided Plath with a vocabulary to articulate ambiguous feelings about romantic and parental relationships, such as the demon metaphor in ‘On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover’. This chapter likewise looks at the broader post-war discourse, from Freudian psychoanalysis to politics that borrowed the themes from the well-known legend about a black magician and Mephistopheles. I revise over-simplified narratives around Plath’s use of diabolical language to show her knowledge of the subject that influenced her and demonstrate that American poets, such as Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, and John Berryman, whom I read in conversation with Plath, employed Faustian vocabulary in their poetry. The post-war deployment of the themes of diabolism and demonology reveals that Plath is not the only poet who linked diabolism with Nazism in ‘Daddy’, alluded to demonic possession in The Bell Jar, and associated dark imagery with violence in ‘Man in Black’, but that the Faust legend provided a metaphor for world politics through the themes of evil, redemption, and morality. This chapter discusses the re-interpretation of Doctor Faustus in post-war discourses, carefully unpicking the references to diabolism and demonology in the works of Plath and her contemporaries.

Continuing the theme of magic and/as power, Chapter 5 discusses Plath’s poems that directly engage with the ways in which the language of magic operates. I introduce the concept of ritual magic, which is a formal or informal performance that employs ritualistic, incantatory language, such as chants, spells, and ritualistic acts. Ritual magic has a set intention to create a physical change by supernatural means, for example, by conjuring, excorcising spirits, or using magical objects. I draw on the medieval and early modern understanding of ritual magic and development in the contemporary trends in the performative reading of poetry to demonstrate that ‘Daddy’ and ‘Burning the Letters’ engage with the idea of poetic spellcasting. My analysis relies on the drafts of the poems, highlighting Plath’s attribution of magical powers to poetic language, which she often erased from the final versions of her poems. Plath had substantial knowledge of the way in which the language of magic functions and her letters give accounts of her practice of informal and spontaneous ritual magic, often used as poetic inspirations. The chapter draws attention to Plath’s poems that interrogate what constitutes ritual magic: by transforming everyday objects into magical aids, for example, the boot in ‘Daddy’, she engages with the blurred boundaries between mundane and magical rituals, exploring the powers of poetry as spellwork.

Continuing the examination of how supernatural vocabulary and narratives operate in poetry, Chapter 6 discusses supernatural transformations in Plath’s poems that interrogate questions about women’s bodily autonomy and magical power. This chapter introduces two concepts associated with supernatural transformations, metamorphosis and shapeshifting, which express different narratives of transformations. Plath explores women’s powerlessness regarding their bodies, sexuality, and reproductive choices through the concept of metamorphosis associated with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the poem ‘Virgin in a Tree’, referencing Daphne’s myth, the female body transforms into a vegetal form, which is a violent and forceful process. One of Plath’s last poems ‘Edge’ likewise narrates the violent metamorphosis of the female body. In contrast, shapeshifting is a voluntary transformation from human to animal form, which traditionally has been regarded as a power of magical women, such as witches. Shapeshifting grants women autonomy who find power and liberation in their animal (often flying) form, which Plath alludes to in, for example, ‘Goatsucker’, and is paralleled by female poets, such as Anne Sexton and Margaret Atwood. Plath also experiments with the fluid borders between the human and the nonhuman in ‘Ariel’, which shows an imaginative flying motion as transformation. My close reading of the drafts of ‘Ariel’ further pays attention to the supernatural aspects of the relationship between the rider and the horse. Plath’s employment of the concepts of supernatural transformations questions normative ideas about gender, agency, and the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. Her creative and personal writings reach back to mythology and folklore on supernatural transformations examining women’s gendered existence and struggle for autonomy in the mid-twentieth century.

The last chapter circles back to Plath’s engagement with political exploitation of the rhetoric of witchcraft and looks at the discourses of modern witchcraft in the 1950s–60s Britain. Chapter 7 introduces the post-war British political landscape and the way in which English nationalism and Cold War anxieties corresponded with the association of witchcraft with the dark other. I look at Plath’s narratives about England in her short stories like ‘Mothers’ and ‘Charlie Pollard and The Beekeepers’, which demonstrate her awareness of the intertwined relationship between the Anglican Church, English nationalism, and British colonialism that contributed to the revival of racial rhetoric of witchcraft. My chapter also brings attention to Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis that became a foundation for Wicca and discusses the perception of witchcraft in post-war British literature and politics. I argue that the dark, racialised, and female bees in Plath’s bee sequence interrogate the binary between self and the other and challenge ideas about magical and racialised power. She draws on post-war politics on the racial rhetoric of witchcraft, literature on the witches’ sabbath, and dark magic in The Tempest in comparing the bees to diabolical flying women. Plath’s poems correspond to the view that the fear of the other and the fear of witchcraft originate from the same sources. The drafts of the bee poems reveal her explicit association of the bees with diabolical foreign creatures whose ability to fly makes them similar to witches. While this chapter also addresses concerns about Plath’s engagement with the racist and colonial rhetoric of witchcraft, I emphasise her understanding of the witch-hunt as a metaphor for twentieth-century racial injustices and her empathy towards marginalised communities. Plath’s bee metaphor simultaneously challenges and reinforces the identification of the dark other with fearful magical power.

This book benefits from the attention paid to the rich resources from the archives, including drafts of Plath’s poems in which the supernatural imagery has previously been overlooked. I look closely at Plath’s drafts, annotations, and marginalia that inform us about her writing and editing process. In addition to the manuscripts, I consider Plath’s annotations in books and additional memorabilia kept at SCSC and interview files from the Harriet Rosenstein research papers, Plath’s high school paper from the Lilly Library to reexamine narratives on her engagement with and interpretation of the supernatural. What all chapters share is the reading of Plath’s poetry, prose, and supplementary personal writings from an interdisciplinary approach, which centres supernatural themes, vocabulary, and narratives on gender, power, and magic. I offer a series of chapters focusing on a set of key concepts and themes that illuminate Plath’s varied engagement with the supernatural to interrogate gender, power, and magic, offering pathways for new scholarship. This book is a celebration of everything magical in Plath’s writings: it recentres discussion around Plath and the supernatural, pivoting it to her well-informed knowledge of the history and literature of witchcraft, the political and cultural framework in which she encountered these discourses, her poetic craft, and the curiosity and empathy that allowed her to create such rich work.