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Sylvia Plath - In Her Own Words

© John McManamy

"Make no mistake, The Bell Jar is THE depression memoir."

It was a bitter cold winter in 1963, and an American mother of two was doing her best to cope on her own in London, not long after being jilted by her husband for another woman. Poet Sylvia Plath, 30, left out bread and milk for her two toddlers sleeping in an upstairs bedroom.

Then she turned on the gas.

Following the posthumous publication of her Ariel poems, Sylvia Plath became a feminist cause celebre, with ex-husband poet Ted Hughes vilified as an accomplice to her death. Completely overlooked by these feminist critics, however, was Exhibit A, the writer's very own words, her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.

Check out this description of her shock treatment:

" ... with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant."

The book also recounted her attempted suicide at age 20, not to mention her morbid preoccupation with death. The Bell Jar was a metaphor for the feelings of hopelessness and despair and self-contempt she carried with her everywhere:

"How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with it's stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?"

Make no mistake, this book is THE depression memoir, but in an age when the disorder was misunderstood as a neurosis, if acknowledged at all, Sylvia Plath became the silent party in all the finger-pointing and mudslinging that passed for commentary in the decades following her death.

Now that is changing. Publisher Faber and Faber has just released her Journals, never before published in full. Finally, we hear Sylvia's side of her story, in her own words. According to an article in the Guardian:

"It is here in her diaries that Plath reveals what she really thinks - about her depression, about her sexuality and about Hughes."

In an early entry, she reveals her manic as well as depressive side: "God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?"

And again: "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous and positive and despairing negative; whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering."

On the day after she met Ted Hughes, she wrote a poem "about the dark forces of lust.." Entitled "Pursuit," it begins: "There is a panther stalks me

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