Sylvia Plath: Troubled Woman, Talented Author, Whose Life Ended in Suicide

Sylvia Plath began her life in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932. In Sylvia's childhood, her father, Otto, died after an untreated case of diabetes. His suffering and prolonged illness scared the young Sylvia and heavily influenced her views of men in her life. Her distorted perception of the roles of men and women became the force behind her work, and later, the cause of her demise.

Sylvia was an excellent student, and was accepted to Smith College on a scholarship in 1950. She tried to appear happy outwardly, but her reality was depression and thoughts of suicide. She was institutionalized after an attempted suicide in 1953 at Maclean Hospital. In 1955, Sylvia attended Newnham College at Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship. There she met Ted Hughes at a party in February 1956. They were married four months later in London. Soon after their honeymoon in Spain, Sylvia took a teaching position at Smith College, where she had studied a few years before. After a year of failure, in Sylvia's view, she began to secretly see her therapist from her hospitalization at Maclean, Ruth Boucher.

In 1959, Sylvia and Ted returned to England, as Sylvia was pregnant and due to give birth the following spring. During her pregnancy, she went under contract with William Heinemann Ltd. to publish The Colossus. A miscarriage the next year worsened Sylvia's depression. In August 1961, the little family moved to a Devon farm, further isolating Sylvia, especially from Ted. Their second child, a son, was born in January of 1962. In July of that year, Sylvia discovered Ted's affair with Assia Wevill. In September, Sylvia and Ted separated. By December, Sylvia and the children had moved into an apartment at 23 Fitzroy Road, the former home of William Butler Yeats. The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas in 1963. Then, on February 11, 1963, Sylvia committed suicide, killing herself by putting her head in a gas oven.

Many of her literary successes were received after her death. In fact, most of her work was published after her death. In 1982, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her Collected Poems. Only recently her collection of poems titled Ariel, which she wrote shortly before her death, has been republished in her original format. Her husband, Ted Hughes, edited the collection before its first publication, removing those poems that showed anger toward him, adding a few that Sylvia left out, and then reordering them to suit him. Editing is usually needed before publication, but Ted Hughes purposely removed parts of Sylvia's work directed at him. The restored edition of the work was printed with a foreword by her daughter, Frieda, who until then had never read her mother's best work. "Sometimes we have to wait until we're the right age for something," says Hughes, 44. "When you're a child and you're growing up with something that happened as it happened in my childhood, you often don't want to look at it."

Plath's work struck me as that of a troubled soul before I had even read her biography. Some of her poems are filled with gruesome descriptions, many odd and unnerving notions most of us have difficulty grasping. This poem, titled "Stillborn," is fairly easy to interpret, but not exactly the personification one would expect for poetry:

These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air -
It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.

Other oddities in Plath's work stem from Ted's unusual hodgepodge of pagan beliefs and Celtic myth, which Sylvia delved into to please her husband. From their dabbling in black magic and superstitions poems such as "Sonnet to Satan" emerged:
In darkroom of your eye the moonly mind
somersaults to counterfeit eclipse;
bright angels black out over logic's land
under shutter of their handicaps.
Commanding that corkscrew comet jet forth ink
to pitch the white world down in swiveling flood,
you overcast all order's noonday rank
and turn god's radiant photograph to shade.
Steepling snake in that contrary light
invades the dilate lens of genesis
to print your flaming image in birthspot
with characters no cockcrow can deface.
O maker of proud planet's negative,
obscure the scalding sun till no clocks move.

Many of Plath's poems are tied to her distorted view of her domestic role as a mother. One poem that shows her ambivalence, even disparity toward her children and home, is "I Want, I Want,"

Open-mouthed, the baby god
Immense, bald, though baby-headed,
Cried out for the mother's dug.
The dry volcanoes cracked and split,
Sand abraded the milkless lip.
Cried then for the father's blood
Who set wasp, wolf and shark to work,
Engineered the gannet's beak.
Dry-eyed, the inveterate patriarch
Raised his men of skin and bone,
Barbs on the crown of gilded wire,
Thorns on the bloody rose-stem.

Plath's insanity steeped poetry can seem eerie and a little nauseating at times, but it also offers great insight into her mind. Her descriptions are vivid, though sometimes strange, giving a crystal clear picture of her subject, regardless of what it is. Much of her work deals with suffering, sickness, madness, and death. This is not surprising, given the circumstances of her life. Her unstable life led to her demise, but yielded deep and moving work, however bizarre it may be.

Works Cited

Jeannine Dobbs, "'Viciousness in the Kitchen': Sylvia Plath's Domestic Poetry," in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1977, pp. 11-25.

Alvarez , Al. Where Did It All Go Right? Richard Cohen Books. http://www.guardian.co.uk
Kinsey-Clinton, Michelle. "The Willing Domesticity of Sylvia Plath: A Rebuttal of the "Feminist" Label." www.sapphireblue.com May 27, 1997

Female Author
All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world:
Favored (while suddenly the rains begin
Beyond the window) she lies on cushions curled
And nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin.
Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses
Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms
Where polished highboys whisper creaking curses
And hothouse roses shed immortal blooms.
The garnets on her fingers twinkle quick
And blood reflects across the manuscript;
She muses on the odor, sweet and sick,
Of festering gardenias in a crypt,
And lost in subtle metaphor, retreats
From gray child faces crying in the streets.
Family Reunion
Outside in the street I hear
A car door slam; voices coming near;
Incoherent scraps of talk
And high heels clicking up the walk;
The doorbell rends the noonday heat
With copper claws;
A second's pause.
The dull drums of my pulses beat
against a silence wearing thin.
The door now opens from within.
Oh, hear the clash of people meeting - -
The laughter and the screams of greeting:
Fat always, and out of breath,
A greasy smack on every cheek
From Aunt Elizabeth;
There, that's the pink, pleased squeak
Of Cousin Jane, out spinster with
The faded eyes
And hands like nervous butterflies;
While rough as splintered wood
Across them all
Rasps the jarring baritone of Uncle Paul;
The youngest nephew gives a fretful whine
And drools at the reception line.
Like a diver on a lofty spar of land
Atop the flight of stairs I stand.
A whirlpool leers at me,
I cast off my identity
And make the fatal plunge.