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Sylvia Plath: Sad Creature (Part One)

© Audrey McCrone

Sylvia Plath wrote a work of prose under the pseudonym Victoria Lewis, entitled "The Bell Jar." When she was young, a woman was expected to be all sorts of things: mother, wife, and consistently smiling, wearing dresses, aprons, and being content with her home life. Caring for the children, cleaning the house, cooking dinner, and having sex with Hubby to keep him happy at home. A faithless husband becomes the lowest kind of traitor, disregarding her devotion.

Ms. Plath had a suicidal nervous breakdown in her early adulthood, was saved (held together by glue, it seems, after reading "Daddy"). She received shock therapy treatment (certainly a brutal and now nonexistent method of 'rehabilitation'). Plath returned to the world to try and cope through poetry; trying to pull the pieces of her broken life together and move on, less a father and aiming to start over.

A highly biographical poet, Plath was once teen editor for Mademoiselle magazine, decidedly intellectual as she went to Smith College and graduated summa cum laude. After winning various awards her senior year, she was given a scholarship to attend Cambridge University, where she met Ted Hughes, fellow and equally famous poet. But any markedly great romance will exhibit extreme emotional highs and lows.

They fell in love, had two children and two miscarriages. (How devastating!) During this time, Plath published The Colossus (in 1960), and then her career languished. She developed a love/hate relationship with her unfaithful husband, whom she eventually left. "Lady Lazarus" reflects her standard standard (double you know) view of men, and is considered rather sexually driven. "Daddy" is a biographical piece and offers not-so-subtle hints there was little love between them. She apparently regarded her father the same way she would view men, in general, through her life.

One should consider that Plath and Anne Sexton took a class together at Boston U. and their professor was Robert Lowell: "The Dean of the Confessional School of Poetry." Melancholy as the two women's views are, Anne Sexton killed herself in 1974. Sexton shared Plath's experiences of having breakdowns and being institutionalized, writing To Bedlam and Partway Back about an insane asylum in London. It describes chaos and madness, and takes a stab at religious symbolism in "For God While Sleeping."

Later, Sylvia Plath put her head in an oven with the gas on, at age 31, successfully taking her own life. Ted Hughes, disgustingly ironic, inherited her poems and published them, posthumously. Those volumes are Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees. Plath's is a tragic personality and her voice is often sad, cold, and detached. She has been hailed as martyr, a sacrificial angel due to her mental illness (which did exist Pre-Hughes). Hughes remarried and his second wife also committed suicide. What a catch that guy must have been! Both Hughes and Plath have enormous reputations as extremely talented poets.