There is so much to Elin Cullhed’s Euphoria, I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps an appropriate starting point is that I found this novel wholly absorbing.

Euphoria is an account of Sylvia Plath’s final year, marked by significant events – the birth of her second child, Nick; the publication of her first novel, The Bell Jar; and the unraveling of her marriage to Ted Hughes.

It’s gutsy, isn’t it, to write a novel about the pleasure and pain of love from the first-person perspective of Plath, when Plath herself offered exactly that through her writing? And yet, Cullhed achieves something special here. As Plath ‘describes’ her domestic life (baking, gardening, beekeeping, entertaining) with Hughes and the children on their property in Devon, the reader is given access to her increasingly anguished thoughts – pain, uncertainty and doubt invade even the most ordinary moments.

But there’s also a feverish determination in Plath, a part of her that knows she needs and wants more, a striving for something else, just out of reach. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight and by being a bystander, we know that this determination, this desire, might have been ultimately satisfied by her writing, but for Plath, immersed in it, the focus was misplaced on Hughes (I’ll avoid a chicken-and-egg spiral here because obviously, without the ‘material’ that Hughes provided by being a part of her life, would her writing have been the same?).

I nodded, I sobbed, I wanted him there always, standing right there, in my trap, in my female trap, in my arms, but then I wanted him to be content, not to feel trapped.

Cullhed’s writing is wonderful. Plath relays the moments after Nick’s birth –

“I’ll leave you for a moment,” the midwife whispered and walked out of the swampy dark room that smelled of freshly cut hay. Actually, it smelled of the sea. Ocean and seaweed, and my son was sticky as if fetched from the sea. I looked into his eyes. Black and with a gaze of iron. Who was he? Where did he come from? Why did he also smell of freshly baked bread?

And later –

I was tired. I lay down with Nick on the floor, in the white beam of light. I held my son’s index finger. It was June: my debut book had been released in the US. And nowhere could I find peace except in the circle of Nick’s little finger.

I read this book as part of Literary Wives Book Club, and can’t quite believe I hadn’t come across it prior to the book club prompt because it’s exactly my thing.

The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

Euphoria highlighted that being in a relationship can make you feel lonelier than if you were in fact alone. The expectations that come with marriage – companionship, loyalty, trust – are often based on fantasy or observations of others’ experiences. Realistically, these things aren’t a given. Rather, a successful marriage is a continuous build on a foundation of trust. Without trust, there is an obvious lack of safety, and without a sense of safety we are in anxiety-mode (that’s how we are hard-wired). Sustained anxiety-mode becomes overwhelming.

I would like to find a way to tell Ted that my loneliness was painful. That my loneliness when I was not permitted to be alone together with him made me a despicable piece of humanity – a kind of half-being, someone you could use as a character in a dystopian novel about ogres. Unliving. Half-dead.
I needed to be reassured that I was alive, that I stood at the centre of the story and was worth lipstick and a greeting.

Cullhed depicts Plath as someone yearning for connection, and the realsiation that this will not be fulfilled by Hughes unfolds as the novel progresses. Furthermore, Hughes appears to make connections with other people (romantic and/or other) that only serve to fuel Plath’s loneliness, anger and confusion (and at a more nuanced level, highlight her self-perceived ‘lacking’).

It was so lonely to be home without him and no matter which angle I looked at in the mirror I couldn’t find one that accurately reflected who I was.

There’s more to be said about the theme of freedom in this book – felt individuality and within marriage – but it’s beyond the scope of my review, short of noting the inherent tension between freedom and loneliness. As the story progresses, we see that Hughes has his freedom, while Plath struggles with the incongruity of feeling constricted in his presence and yet also too lonely to demand time on her own in order to write.

 Tired of marriage tired of captivity tired of the monster I apparently was – I had miscalculated everything, even myself.

See Rebecca’s, Kay’s and Naomi’s reviews, too.

4/5

I had been struck by the completely commonplace I’ve-had-a-kid-and-my-freezer-is-fully-stocked-with-pound-cake-and-a-dreamlife kind of hubris.