How was Plath—without ruining her poems—to retain authentic features of her imagination, such as the symbols of melodrama and violence absorbed from her childhood literary matrix of legends, fairy tales, and catastrophic myths from Bluebeard to Dracula? Plath’s later interesting revisions of these theatrical dramatis personae created them as ambiguous characters, so that the melodrama is generated by a conflict in which no clear moral discrimination can be made between protagonist and antagonist. Plath herself could only rarely play the part of an innocent victim; she felt more honest, in her most conspicuously staged poems, when playing the man-eating Lady Lazarus pitting her obscene striptease against her voyeuristic audience, or the vampire-killing daughter vanquishing the vampire paren...