I have a “culture of womanhood” theory that I think explains this well. 

The work of women becomes a part of a kind of womanhood lexicon. Plath, Woolf, Austen, and so on, while all being a part of a wider culture are also, more specifically, a part of female culture. The thing about this culture is that it frequently does not cater to men and has very little to do with them. These women created for themselves. For the love of it. For other women. Men were a secondary concern at best. Men do not like this.

Even if at the time of creation these pieces of female culture had to go through male gatekeepers to be published and shared, at this stage in history those male gatekeepers are increasingly falling away. Women are finding these works on their own, through recommendations from other women, through female word of mouth, female academics, and so on. It’s beautiful.

The most critical part is that men do not factor in. They have no place here. It’s a bitter pill for patriarchal society to swallow. So they ridicule it. They attempt to reduce its value, sending a message to women that the culture of womanhood is cliche, typical, predictable, stupid. It happens with Plath. It happens with boy bands. It happens with make up. Anything that is for females and leaves little to no space for men will attract their condescension and hatred.

What’s more, in the case of Plath, mental illness plays a large factor. In my experience men love to make fun of the female mentally ill because women tend to express their illness in highly emotive ways - and we all know how terrified men are of emotion. It is what makes mental illness for males so particularly fatal, in fact. But expressing emotion is frequently seen as attention seeking, manipulative, typically female. So it is ridiculed.

Female culture is so regularly dismissed as being part of a “trend” or, for the most lasting elements, simply ridiculous, cliche, etc. What’s worse is that women do it to themselves too. We happily allow everything marketed to female interests be packaged up as fleeting trends. The latest “must have”. Female culture is being increasingly swallowed up and manipulated by capitalism for this reason, and the fleeting nature of a lot of female-centric interests makes it easier for patriarchal society to diminish us as flippant, vain, uninterested in serious, lasting things. It’s no coincidence that modern marketing and capitalism originally began by marketing beauty and fashion products to teenage girls. 

Anyway, that’s how I’ve begun to see it. I’m still developing my ideas on the topic but this is the basics of it.