By Celia Papavasileiou,
Sylvia Plath was just 30 years old when she took her own life. On the morning of the 11th of February of 1963, she was found “laying on the floor of the kitchen with her head resting on the oven”. She got up at 7 am, prepared breakfast for her children and taped the edges of their door. Then she locked herself in the kitchen and turned on the gas.
Her death, following a record of suicide attempts, was a result of her severe case of depression and bipolar disorder. Plath might have ended her life, but her legacy remains intact. Leaving behind a wide selection of poems and one novel, she managed to turn her pain into brilliant prose, inspiring readers worldwide even decades after her death.
Plath had a complicated childhood. She was born in Boston in 1932, daughter of the German immigrant college professor, Otto Plath, and his student, Aurelia Schober. Her relationship with her parents, and especially her father who died in 1940 from cancer, marked Plath’s life and work. In her poem titled “Daddy”, which Plath wrote just a few months before her suicide, that effect is evident: “At twenty I tried to die/ And get back, back, back to you”, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”.
Even though her personal life was always difficult, Plath was a gifted student and showed promise of literary talent from a young age. She published her first poem at just nine years old and got into Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts with a scholarship. It was at college, however, when she first started experiencing symptoms of severe depression.
“Wherever I sat —on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok— I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air”. The main protagonist’s words in Plath’s novel, “The Bell Jar”, perfectly capture the feelings of loneliness and disappointment Plath felt in her own mind and body. In August of 1953, she committed her first suicide attempt at the age of 20, by swallowing sleeping pills.
However, she managed to bounce back, after a recovery that included her hospitalization and treatment by electroshock therapy. She completed her degree at Smith College and earned a Fulbright grant to study at Cambridge University in England. Those years proved to be crucial for her life. At Cambridge she encountered Ted Hughes, an English poet. The two got married in 1956, after just four months of dating and had two children. Nevertheless, their marriage fell apart when Plath discovered Hughes’s affair with another woman, Assia Wevill. They divorced in 1962 and Plath had to tend for their children on her own.
Hughes didn’t just impact her life, but also her work. Her poems explore the female psyche and identity in a male-dominated society. The anger, the sadness, and the madness that comes with being a woman, unable to escape the patriarchy, is a prominent theme in her works. In her poem titled “Lady Lazarus”, Plath describes what we now know as “female rage”. She blamed the men in her life for her suffering. The last verse of the poem states that clearly: “Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air”. The reader is left with a sense of anger and revenge. Is the destruction of the men in Plath’s life the only way she could have made it?
Certainly, after her divorce, Plath’s life started falling apart. She tried to publish her semi-autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar”, but it received negative commentary and was rejected to be published in the U.S. It got published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”, in 1963, in England just a month before her suicide. Her melancholy only grew stronger. On the weekend before she died, she visited friends, the Beckers, expressing to them her distress regarding her novel. After trying to comfort her and insisting they drive her home, Plath assured them: “No, this is nonsense, take no notice”. She killed herself the next day.
“Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.”, is one of the most famous verses of her works. Plath wasn’t afraid of dying. Her suicidal thoughts were what urged her to create. To her, it wasn’t an emotion she could or wanted to mask. Was her honesty about wanting to die a form of foreshadowing? Her artistry never stops to amaze the reader. Only Plath could turn death into something to be accomplished, something to be desired even.
“How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”, wonders the protagonist of “The Bell Jar”. Surely, Plath never got to answer that question. Her own “bell jar” strangled her. Her depression consumed her, pushing her to make a choice she wouldn’t be able to take back. How do we learn to keep going? How do we believe that the best is yet to come? Most importantly, how do we learn to escape our own “bell jar”?
After her death, the publications under Plath’s name multiplied. To this day, we have access to her journals, her letters, and poems she wrote but didn’t have time to publish herself. The “Collected Poems” of Sylvia Plath, containing poems she created between 1956 and 1963, published by Hughes in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She finally got honored with the recognition she always deserved. Sylvia Plath will never be forgotten. She teaches us how to be brave, and how we can ensure for ourselves the happy ending she never got.
References
- Sylvia Plath. nytimes. Available here
- Sylvia Plath. poetryfoundation.org. Available here
- The Haunting Story Of How Sylvia Plath Died And The Tragic Events That Led Up To It, allthatsinteresting. Available here
