 “Vanity Fair” appears to have been written on October 28, 1956, judging from Plath’s pocket diary. “Vanity Fair” is Plath’s poke at the television sitcoms and soap operas such as The Grove Family in the UK, and As the World Turns in the United States, which were both becoming popular at the time. In 1956, the BBC also launched a six-part dramatic television series called “Vanity Fair,” after the classic William Makepeace Thackeray novel of the same name.
Plath’s poem makes it fairly clear that she was not a fan of the newest form of entertainment, television. In Plath’s “Vanity Fair,” the first stanza appears to be the television itself with its crooked finger antennae beckoning the black and white signal in its “frost-thick weather” (CP, 31). Plath sees television as a “hazardous medium,” with witchy connotations. She felt it was designed to create envy and those seeking to copy the television models, and to steal the “sky’s color” by turning attention to itself. The television promotes gossip (“bruit”) and its stars become “holy ones.” In the third stanza, the “furred air” is the staticky picture of the black-and-white television sets of Plath’s time. A “midden” is an arcane word for a dung heap, and TV inserts this dung into the skull with “no knife.” Plath sees simple church-going girls waylaid by the glamour they see upon its programs. In the fourth stanza, she shows the young wives in the kitchen, cooking and watching straying lovers and gold-digging women. The wives squander their night-times (“owl-hours”) with tales of dirty beds and unconfessed (“unshriven”) deeds. The poem continues addressing the power and irrationality of television over the mind, casting its spell on lovesick girls to believe in an artificial world and to place their own vanity first. Plath has personified television as both “sorceress” and at the end, “Satan’s wife.” Like the moral of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, “those million brides” in their houses shriek out over what is essentially a sinful attachment to worldly things. Finally, it seems that Plath’s disdain for television started young, as she published a poem in The 1952 commencement issue of The Campus Cat called “Virus TV: (We Don’t Have a Set Either”). For more on this, see https://sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com/2021/10/two-unattributed-published-sylvia-plath.html AS THE WORLD TURNS, EARLY POEMS, PLATH POEM, SOAP OPERAS, SYLVIA PLATH, TELEVISION, THACKERAY, THE CAMPUS CAT, THE GROVE FAMILY, TV, VANITY FAIR, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
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