Sylvia Plath’s favorite color was red. When Ted Hughes left her for another woman, Plath installed a red rug under her writing desk. But she also loved red’s opposite, blue — and other polarizations. Upon Ted’s abandonment, she wrote to her mother: It’s as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative — which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart. Plath’s duality — as a happy-go-lucky American girl and a deeply depressed, deathly ambitious writer — stirs up the darker parts of her audience. We either revile Plath for her cowardice or we celebrate her for her bravery. It depends on whether you look and see blue or red.