There is something genuinely important about pre-established patterns, of course, but I also think that the conversation should not end at a wall of conventions.
I have been reading me some Sylvia Plath recently, specifically The Bell Jar[1], and the tragic author’s particular style caught me off guard. It was a random pick, hitting different from my normal fare, and an unexpected treat. Specifically it was so much more modern feeling than I had expected. The writing is personal, poetic and visceral, and I would suppose likely bending perceptions and expectations from a female author of that era. I was captivated.
Now I don’t know if this rings true in the particular case of Ms. Plath but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that she was probably not following what passed for conventional patterns in fiction of the early nineteen sixties.
Those early years of the cultural revolutions that shook up western culture are often only visible via media artifacts and what remains of music and television and media that prevailed from that decade, particularly to those of us who missed the sixties by a decade or two.
It is also probably the case that we remember her work not merely because it is twisted up in her personal story that ended in sadness shortly after The Bell Jar was published.
But too, I think, it might be that Ms. Plath broke down walls of conventions and stepped outside of the expectations of popular patterns to mark her own voice and style. I think she was probably setting trends in how her literature opened up in honesty to her readers, bending rules that had likely been finger wagged at her from the start.
Those old styles defined an era, but styles change. None of what has come before is ever so sacred that we can’t try something new. She did.
She would have been an artifact of that era herself, well into her nineties had she been around today, and maybe, well almost certainly, interested to see that a style she embraced, maybe even pioneered, was an inspiration and a convention itself sixty years later.