In a therapy session with her psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Beuscher, Sylvia Plath reached a state of catharsis after Beuscher granted her permission to hate her mother. “Better than shock treatment,” the poet recounted in her journal.
To Sylvia, her mother, Aurelia Plath, was the murderer of her own husband, the pitiful working mother of two, and the dominating matriarch who ruled over her daughter’s life. Sylvia resented her mother for her lack of love towards her husband and Sylvia’s father, Otto Plath, as revealed in extensive tirades in her journals. She wrote of how her mother killed him “by marrying him too old, by marrying him sick to death and dying, by burying him every day since in her heart, mind and words.” She felt robbed of a father’s love at eight years old and held her mother responsible, despite knowing that complications from diabetes had taken her father’s life.
Soured by a despondent marriage, her mother imposed her own cynical perspective on love onto Sylvia, believing it was only through compromise that a woman could find happiness. Since Aurelia herself had married a man she did not love and been a working mother, she believed a “sweet little loving imitation man,” as Sylvia described in her journal, was the best compromise her daughter could get. The passionately independent writer, however, had other plans.
Born on October 27th, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath was the daughter of German immigrant Otto Plath and his student Aurelia Schober. At a young age, the poet showed an aptitude for writing, publishing her first poem in the Boston Herald, a local Boston newspaper, at eight, a few months before her father’s death. Plath was a straight-A student with eyes set on academic perfection, winning various literary contests and selling her first poem to The Christian Science Monitor and her first short story to Seventeen magazine while still in high school.
However, Plath began showing indications of depression at an early age. She described her childhood in a 1961 BBC interview. “I think I was very happy up to the age of about nine – very carefree – and I believed in magic, which influenced me a great bit. And then, at nine, I was rather disillusioned – I stopped believing in elves and Santa Claus and all these little beneficent powers – and became more realistic and depressed, I think, and then, gradually, became a bit more adjusted about the age of sixteen or seventeen. But I certainly didn’t have a happy adolescence – and, perhaps, that’s partly why I turned specially to writing,” Plath said.
Plath’s writing in her posthumously-published journals displays her turbulent emotions and suggests a wavering mental state. In the spring of 1951, Plath started attending Smith College on a scholarship and wrote, “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
The following year, she won the Mademoiselle Fiction Contest, which gave her the opportunity to work on the magazine’s August 1953 issue for a month in Manhattan. Coupled with work fatigue, an agonizing subsequent rejection from a Harvard writing course that summer left Plath spiraling into depressive episodes.
After beginning to see a psychiatrist and starting electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), Plath swallowed almost an entire bottle of sleeping pills and hid in a crawl space under her house porch where she remained for two days. It was only through the sound of her groans that her family found her; she later stayed for four months at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts for the treatment of depression, taking a semester’s leave from college. There, she received ECT and underwent psychotherapy with Dr. Beuscher, with whom Plath established a close relationship. The poet would continue confiding in Dr. Beuscher until the end of her life, with her journals documenting their sessions. Plath received emotional validation and the aforementioned sanction to hate her own mother in one such session.
Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas; the writer chose anonymity due to the unfavorable depictions of some of the characters based on various people in her own life. The protagonist, Ester Greenwood, undergoes a journey of existential self-discovery, navigating adulthood amidst conventional gender norms and the uncertainty of her future. Like Plath, Esther leaves Boston for New York City to serve as a magazine guest editor for a month, faces a rejection from an anticipated writing class, and struggles with a descent into and later treatment of psychotic depression. The young heroine also grapples with her father’s premature death and flawed relationship with her mother.
The story is bleak, exemplifying the deteriorating mind of an ambitious female writer who feels imprisoned inside a metaphorical bell jar, suffocating in rotten air until the glass is finally lifted, but remains hovering as a looming presence above her head. Plath’s blunt, piercing prose conveys Esther’s musings of suicide with authenticity and reflects the tragic effects of mental illness.
While Esther’s tale ends in ambiguity regarding her leaving hospital wards for the reality she has been running from, Plath’s story continues with her return to Smith College in February 1954, where she graduated summa cum laude one year later. In October of 1955, she began studying English at Newnham College at Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship.
It was at a Cambridge University party where Plath met fellow poet Ted Hughes, with whom she fell intensely in love. Idealistic and messy, their relationship developed rapidly. She wrote in her journal on the night they met: “I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off. . . . And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.”
They married that year. Soon after joining the faculty as an English instructor at her American alma mater, Smith College, Plath abandoned a career as an educator and joined her husband in freelance writing. The two moved back to England in late 1959 and had their first child, Frieda. Many of Plath’s poems were accepted by The New Yorker and Hughes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, initially easing the couple’s financial pressure of raising a family. However, the struggle of earning enough money from writing eventually manifested into marital strains, especially after the arrival of their second child, Nicholas, two years later.
Still, Plath loved her husband, writing, “He is better than any teacher, even fills somehow that huge, sad hole I feel in having no father.” Her desperation to find solace in male attention was perhaps part of the reason why she found Hughes’ later infidelity so devastating. Once she realized even the person she believed to be her soulmate could betray her, the two separated, and Plath’s psyche destabilized.
Plath, suffering from addictions to sleeping pills and smoking, wrote forty poems during this period that would comprise the collection Ariel, including some of her most famed pieces. Marked by their vivid portrayals of human emotion, the poems, along with others by poets including Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell, helped pioneer the school of confessional poetry, which focused on portrayals of the poets’ own experiences and oftentimes of stigmatized issues. Plath wrote intrepidly of her opinions toward women’s constricted role in society and mental illness.
In Ariel, “Daddy” chronicles the resentment Plath held towards her father’s early death. She feels trapped inside the “black shoe” that is her father and compares him to a fascist. Such metaphors reflect her innermost thoughts and emotions that had been haunting her since her childhood. The poem echoes the feelings of desperation, rage, and agony felt throughout Plath’s childhood.
In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath discusses themes of suicide and depression through a female rendition of the Biblical legend, in which Lazarus is reborn after death. In the poem, Lady Lazarus is unwillingly brought back to life after each of her suicide attempts. Written in the wake of her third and latest attempt, the poem reveals the spite and anger of the revived, mangled Lady Lazarus for being subjected to an amused public who gathers around her after each rebirth, eyeing and touching her. She feels like she is putting on a “theatrical” performance for the entertainment of the onlookers, who treat her scarred body as a spectacle, charging others for a touch, a strand of hair, and even a drop of blood.
The poems in Ariel convey a harrowing sense of melancholic frustration, indicative of the poet’s own plight. Unable to save her marriage and suffering from a weakening disposition, Plath wrote in her last letter to Dr. Beuscher on February 4, 1963: “What appals (sic) me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst—cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies.”
The poet made her final suicide attempt on February 11th. After leaving mugs of milk and a plate of bread for her two children as they slept and sealing their room with towels and tape, Plath turned on the gas in the oven and placed her head inside, ending her life.
Ariel would be published posthumously in 1965, gaining substantial attention and introducing Plath’s work to the world. The Bell Jar was republished under Plath’s name in the United States six years later, providing a strongly autobiographical account of the poet’s previous hospitalization and recovery. Even after death, Plath lives on in her stories, journals, and letters. Her penetrative style of writing has inspired new generations of poets and authors to write about their lived experiences and sentiments, and dared them to examine the grim aspects of life and scrutinize society.
Plath’s life is often inextricably connected to her death. With the knowledge of her imminent suicide, reading The Bell Jar and her journal entries is like retracing of a map of her life. Her early works depict her mental illness and her attempts to treat it; as we move on to the poems written in the months leading up to her death, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” shed light on her convoluted feelings accumulated since her childhood.
The tragedy that ended Plath’s life has since cast an overwhelming shadow over the poet’s work. Due to the nature of her death, critics often reduce her writing to the manifestation of a fragile, troubled mind, one that fell victim to unhealthy relationships with men. However, the poet’s work extends beyond the confines of such a label, as her writing helped pave the way for literary exploration of topics often seen as taboo, including mental health and women’s rights. Many women saw themselves in Esther Greenwood, from her rejection of patriarchal society to her famous “fig tree analogy,” in which she sees each of her possible future careers as a fig on a fig tree, with each of them falling and rotting as she becomes paralyzed from the thought of choosing the wrong one. Overbearing ambition and wavering commitment — there is solace in the universal fear and uncertainty of our futures.
Even then, however, we must approach Plath’s work with the understanding of her blatant racism, as seen through her derogatory portrayals of people of color in The Bell Jar and comparisons of her suffering to that of the victims of the Holocaust in “Daddy.” While admirers of Plath often praise her contemporary views on feminism and mental illness, her extreme discrimination towards those of minority groups must be taken with equal weight. By recognizing Plath’s racist convictions, we can hold the poet accountable for the reflections of prejudice in her writing. We must be conscious of the poet’s nuanced psyche as we appreciate her progressive notions toward psychological health and women’s place in a male-dominated society. Only then can we become informed readers of the poet’s work and peel back the layers of her identity, to attempt to see her true self.
Nonetheless, the mythos of Sylvia Plath remains, to this day, a mystery. The poet, brazen and devoted to exploring the intimate experience of grief and love, has left behind archives of her work for us to dissect and analyze, yet we may never truly understand her mind.
On the written page, at least, she is inextinguishable.
“I think I was very happy up to the age of about nine – very carefree – and I believed in magic, which influenced me a great bit. And then, at nine, I was rather disillusioned – I stopped believing in elves and Santa Claus and all these little beneficent powers – and became more realistic and depressed, I think, and then, gradually, became a bit more adjusted about the age of sixteen or seventeen. But I certainly didn’t have a happy adolescence – and, perhaps, that’s partly why I turned specially to writing…” Plath said.