experiences with the therapy in the novel is primarily straightforward, in “Johnny Panic” it is woven into an allegorical tapestry that is decidedly more surrealistic and Kafkaesque. The story’s unnamed narrator, a clerical worker in a psychiatric ward, is caught by one of her supervisors, a psychiatrist, copying accounts of patients’ dreams into a secret notebook, which she fancifully calls “Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams.” A self-proclaimed “lover of dreams,” she seeks what, to her mind, is a clearer understanding of the collective unconscious through these stolen dream accounts. She describes the unconscious as a “lake” into which “people’s minds run at night the sewage farm of the ages.”

The narrator is promptly whisked away by the doctor into electroshock therapy, which she chides as an attempt “to unseat Johnny Panic from his own throne.” The story ends with her first treatment, the narrator left “shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory,” her namesake Johnny Panic beckoning her in “a nimbus of arc lights on the ceiling overhead.” The story’s ambiguous, irresolute ending reflects the narrator’s own ambivalence toward both the shame and sanctimoniousness of her illness. At points she flaunts her condition playfully before the reader like a badge of honor; at others she hides it self-consciously like her purloined book of dreams.

“The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle”

Written in 1959, “The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle” contains some of Plath’s boldest experiments with subject matter, description, and characterization. Written in first person, but with relatively little interpretive intrusion on the part of the narrator, the story meticulously describes the inner workings of a tattoo shop. On the insistence of her “steady man” Ned Bean, the narrator visits the shop of Carmey, a colorful and matter-of-fact tattoo artist, where she furtively explores the part-ritualistic, part-clinical exhibition of Carmey’s craft.

The narrator tentatively observes Carmey as he tattoos two men—one a seasoned sailor, the other a naïve schoolboy. Each man’s unique reaction to this exotic, seminal experience sets up the story’s central dynamic, which involves the tension between the pride and fear associated with this archetypal but enigmatic ritual. Plath describes the ritual memorably, in a story rich and perceptive in its passion for detail and description.

“Mothers”

Plath’s last completed story, “Mothers,” written in 1962, deals with two of the most prevalent motifs in her fiction, hypocrisy and motherhood. The story concerns Esther, a young mother who, having recently moved to the English countryside, seeks to involve herself in her new community by attending a “Mothers’ Union” meeting at the local church. Through a litany of disillusioning experiences with superficial and self-important “church people,” Esther eventually establishes a more satisfying, meaningful relationship with Mrs. Nolan, an outspoken, endearing divorcée. Ironically, Mrs. Nolan has been summarily excluded from the Mothers’ Union because of the church’s disapproval of divorce. Still, she forges an unlikely but intimate bond with Esther, who shares her sense of alienation and innate sense of being tagged an “outsider.”

“Mothers” is among Plath’s most pointedly autobiographical stories. Written at a time when marital frictions between her and husband Ted Hughes had led to their separation, the story likewise has Esther and husband Tom “arguing loudly and freely” as the story begins. Similarly, “Mothers” presents an almost pathological preoccupation with hypocrisy. This is portrayed primarily in the character of the absentminded, solicitous village rector, who embodies the fundamental lack of sincerity and conviction Esther regards as endemic to organized religion. “Mothers” clearly reflects the struggles Plath herself endured late in her life as she fought to forge a new identity in the wake of marital conflict, single parenthood, religious skepticism, and depression.