Autobiographical Influences in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was a troubled and brilliant poet. She was a wife, a mother, a working woman, a poet, and a feminist in the 1950s when it was much more difficult to reconcile all of these things. Her poetry is labeled as confessional, but is really a woven tapestry between fact and fiction where the reader never really knows which is which. Her true gift was being able to provide autobiographical detail in her poetry without her poetry becoming biography itself. For Plath, the two issues that carried over most from her life to her work were her relationship with family and her battle with depression.

Her relationship with her own father is somewhat outlined in the poem "Daddy." She takes facts and weaves them with fiction to present this poem. Her father was a German immigrant, a professor at Boston University who died when she was eight-years-old. He was emotionally detached and silent but was not a Jew. Plath uses the image of her father to discuss her feelings of being dominated in a male-dominated world and of detailing her troubled unresolved feelings about her own father. Since he died when she was young, she never had the chance to work out issues with him. So, as an adult she writes this poem to assert her own independence and free herself from all the negative feelings about her father. However, ironically, with children who have unresolved feelings about a parent, she marries a man just like her father. This man also turns out not to take her feelings into account. The poem begins with longing concerning a relationship with her father, "I used to pray to recover you" (Plath). However, then the image is brought in of her father being a Nazi and Plath being a Jew. "I have always been scared of you,/With your Luftwaffe, your gobbleygoo./And your neat mustache/And your Aryan eye, bright blue/Panzer-man, panzer-man" details her feelings about her father. Her father was not really a Nazi and she is not really Jewish, but the interplay of the two speaks volumes about how oppressed and persecuted she feels by her father. This is Plath's version of fact and fiction mingling together to create more drama.

She is afraid of him and resents him and longs for him at the same time. She tells the reader of her father's "brute heart" and that he "bit my pretty red heart in two." In marrying poet Ted Hughes, Plath explains, "And then I knew what to do/I made a model of you,/A man in black with a Meinkampf look/And a love of the rack and the screw./And I said I do, I do." This "vampire" of a husband "drank her blood" just like her father. He confined her and controlled her. She denounces both of them in the final lines of the poem. She denounces all male manipulation in her life. "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" (Plath). Her love-hate relationship is even shown here. She calls her father daddy, which is usually a term of endearment or what small children call their fathers. And then she cusses at him in the same line. In the words of Robert Phillips, "Finally the one way the poet was to achieve relief, to become an independent Self, was to kill her father's memory, which, in "Daddy," she does by a metaphorical murder. Making him a Nazi and herself a Jew, she dramatizes the war in her soul" (Phillips).

Her feelings about her children are outlined throughout her body of work. Plath certainly loved her children, but she was also somewhat overwhelmed by the role of motherhood. She is one of the first to speak about this kind of relationship where her love for her child is not sentimentalized but her feelings of anxiety and such about becoming a parent are. The last thing Plath did before she killed herself was to put out mugs of milk and a plate of cookies for her children. "Morning Song" is a poem where a young mother is talking to her child, and is very scared and unsure of her new role as a mom. In "Morning Song," the lines are "I'm no more your mother/Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow/Effacement at the wind's hand" The detachment in these lines are clear. Many times she feels unable to cope with all of the various demands of motherhood.

Her feelings about her husband Ted Hughes are shown in many poems as well. Of course, in "Daddy," the hateful images of her husband and his cruel nature are shown. She has married a cruel man, oblivious of her feelings just like her father was. In "The Applicant," she says, "A living doll, everywhere you look./It can sew, it can cook,/It can talk, talk, talk" (Plath). This is a sales pitch rather than a courtship. Human relationships have been negatively impacted by time, and "we" are all potential applicants. This poem is Plath's way of talking about the idea that women barely exist before marriage and are completely defined by marriage. She is resentful of this and of her husband.

Lastly Plath presents her struggles with depression that eventually ended in suicide throughout her body of works. One of the most famous is "Lady Lazarus." In this poem she dramatically outlines her suicide attempt. Again, is all of it true? No, but she weaves it together with what is true to make a great story. She likens herself again to the image of the Jew. The tone she maintains in this poem is truly scary in that she is so flippant about her suicide attempts. "What a trash/to annihilate each decade" (Plath). And then she discuses the crowd of people who are always there in time of tragedy. Everyone wants to know all the details of her suicide attempt. "What a million filaments./The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see/Them unwrap me hand and foot-/The big strip tease" (Plath). But her attempt fails and she comes back to the very same world she left. People think it's a miracle and that "knocks her out." The poem ends a note kind of like the poem "Daddy." She is denouncing men who control her life She paints a chilling picture of what is left on a victim after being subjected to the gas chamber but says that she will rise like the phoenix and "eat men like air" (Plath). In this poem, one can clearly see the sadness and mental anguish that are really disguised as humor in this poem. Arthur Oberg sums up the connections between "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" beautifully. "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" are poems which seem written at the edge of sensibility and of imagistic technique. They both utilize an imagery of severe disintegration and dislocation. The public horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of fragmented identities become interchangeable. Men are reduced to parts of bodies and to piles of things. The movement in each poem is at once historical and private; the confusion in these two spheres suggests the extent to which this century has often made it impossible to separate them" (Oberg).

Sylvia Plath is really a master at intermixing fact and fiction in order to produce poetry that becomes universal. She may hold true to certain autobiographical details, but her work goes far beyond that. "Although Plath's poetry is often described as confessional, her poetry proves less autobiographical than that of her friends. While she often begins her poems with what seems like autobiographical material, her genius lies in her ability to turn that autobiography into myth and metaphor. One of the great metaphor-makers of the century, Plath uses brilliant imagery to move her poetry far beyond the personal" (learner.org)

Works Cited

American Passages: A Literary Survey. http://www.learner.org/amerpass/unit15/authors-7.html

Oberg, Arthur. On Lady Lazarus. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/lazarus.htm

Phillips, Robert. On Daddy. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/daddy.htm

Plath, Sylvia. Collected Works.