2012-01-02
Explanation
This comic imagines what it would be like if Sylvia Plath, the famously depressive American poet and novelist, wrote children''s fables. A woman (depicted in Plath''s likeness with glasses) reads a bedtime story to a young girl. The story begins with the familiar fairy tale of The Ugly Duckling who becomes a beautiful swan -- but then veers sharply into Plath''s characteristically bleak worldview. The swan''s beauty is "temporary," and "the inexorable passage of time absconded with her beauty and her friends, leaving her alone in a bell jar, slowly turning carbonic with her cynicism, and septic with her failed dreams."
The caption at the bottom reads: "Nobody liked Sylvia Plath''s book of fables." The joke works on multiple levels. The reference to "a bell jar" is a direct nod to Plath''s semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which deals with depression and mental breakdown. The language -- "carbonic," "septic," "cynicism," "failed dreams" -- perfectly mimics Plath''s intense, darkly poetic style, but applied absurdly to a children''s fairy tale where it is wildly inappropriate.
The votey panel continues the gag with the Plath character adding: "Also, Sleeping Beauty was happier before the kiss" -- implying that unconsciousness (or death) is preferable to waking life, another characteristically Plathian sentiment that is darkly humorous when applied to a Disney-style fairy tale.