Story Review: "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom" is a story Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) wrote in 1952 while a student at Smith College and submitted to Mademoiselle magazine for publication, but was rejected. This thin volume would be a well-placed incentive for a new edition of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. The edition seems be a bit of a rush job since there's a font error, Ted Hughes is listed as "Tim" Hughes (or is that an intentional jab?), and the wonderful Ariel: the Restored Edition is called the "Restores" Edition (hopefully these have been corrected). Written when Plath was 20, Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom gives hints of her future genius. In her apprenticeship, Plath seems to be working intently with colors and description, sometimes clumsily: "the wheels clocked away like cogs of a gigantic clock" (?). The story does, however, relate well to the autobiography that she made a significant part of her work. I hate to dwell on that since I believe Plath is underrated as a poet because too much attention is paid to her tragic life instead of the poems, but the relationship to her history is an interesting part of this "new" story. As we've read in her journals and letters, Plath assiduously tried to be a dutiful daughter while at the same time was consumed with vaulting ambition, a massive capacity for hard work, and a certain instability that was both daring and uncontrollable. In this allegorical, symbolic, other worldly story, a young woman (the Maiden) is pressured to take a train ride: "It's not my fault I took this train. It was my parents. They wanted me to go." An older woman (the Crone, source of wisdom) on the train counters: "You let them put you on the train ... and did not rebel." The train apparently takes its riders inevitably to some unpleasant end of the line, unless one acts (makes an "assertion of the will). The Ninth Kingdom is "the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will." The people on the train are (figuratively) blind that they're heading to some horrid destination. It's not difficult to see the train as the average life that leads to boring mundanity unless one makes the effort to slip the surly bonds of conformity. Plath did not want to be limited by her mother's (very real) need for security. Interesting that the father character is described as "anonymous" and "incognito," a far cry from a "man in black with a Meinkampf look." The story seems to be written for herself more than anyone else. Plath is giving herself permission to be daring, to buck the rules, to "jump the track." She's trying to find a way to justify becoming the writer she would be, rather than sticking to the script provided for women in Fifties, while not bringing unhappiness to her mother. It's striking how much Mary needs the Crone's approval. Early on "the woman's eyes were upon her, level after blue level of reproach, and Mary felt herself sinking, drowned in shame." She feels a doom of guilt for not resisting her parents. On the next page, after Mary decides to take action: "The woman flashed Mary a sudden radiant smile, and her eyes lit with admiration." Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom is an enjoyable and compulsive read, apart from biography. While much is suggested, much is left undeveloped; it even has a little echo of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" about it. The older woman's statement that "I could not tell you. I could not help you until you made the first positive decision" reminds me of Glinda the Good Witch telling Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz that she had the power to return home all along. But for all the good moments in Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, it didn't take the author of Ariel and The Bell Jar to write this. As much we love Plath and her work, she deserves our clear-eyed honesty. I'm still glad to have read it, to have a glimpse of the younger Sylvia Plath, as I'll read anything and everything she ever wrote. [3★]
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