Sylvia Plath was a gifted writer, poet and verbal artist whose personal anguish and torment visibly manifested itself in her work. Much of her angst stems from her warped relationship with her father. Other factors that influenced her works were her strained views of human sexuality, her sado-masochistic tendencies, self-hatred and her traditional upbringing. She was labeled as a confessional poet and biographical and historical material is absolutely necessary to understand her work. Syliva Plath was born on 27, 1963, in Boston, Massachusetts to Otto Emil Plath and Aurelia Schober.
Otto Plath was a professor of biology and German at Boston University. He was of German descent and had emigrated from Grabow when he was fifteen. Her mother was a first generation American; she was born in Boston to Austrian parents. Their common Germanic background indirectly led to their meeting in 1929. Aurelia Schober took a German class taught by Otto Plath. Aurelia was working on a master’s degree in English and German at Bosto n University. Otto Plath was guided by his principles of discipline. Their background was one major source of for Sylvia’s poetic imagery. Sylvia’s brother, Warren, was born on April 27, 1935.
After Warren’s birth, the family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts just east of Boston. Otto’s health began to fail shortly after Warren’s birth. He thought he had cancer as a friend of his, with similar symptoms, had recently lost a battle with lung cancer. “He refused to seek medical care due to the lack of a cure or effective treatment at that time. In 1940 after suffering ill health for years, Otto was forced to see a doctor for an infection in his foot. The doctor diagnosed the illness Otto has been suffering from as not cancer, but diabetes- -and not do advanced that it threatened his life.
Otto’s leg had to be removed in October after he developed gangrene, and he spent the rest of his days in the hospital rapidly declining. ” (Nuerotic Poets) Otto Plath died on the night of November 5, 1940. Her fathers’s death scarred her permanently; theirs was an extraordinarily close relationship. In 1942, Aurelia moved the family to Wellesley so that she could return to work despite her own health problems to support her family. Sylvia began writing when she was only five years old. Her first publication was a short couplet she wrote when she was eight years old and published in the Boston Sunday Herald.
She continued to write and publish poems in her junior high school newspaper. Plath consistently received good grades and earned recognition and publication as a writer, artist, and editor. Her senior year, her story “And Summer Will Not Come Again” was accepted for Seventeen magazine. She graduated from high school in 1950 at the top of her class. Her first national publication of one of her poems was “Bitter Strawberries” which appeared in The Christian Science Monitor just after graduation. Plath attended Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts, where she continued building her writing career.
As stated in an article on Neurotic Poets website , “she began developing bouts of depression, insomnia, and thoughts of suicide as evidenced in her journals. “To annihilate the world by annihilation of one’s self is the deluded height of desperate egoism. The simple way out of all the little brick dead ends we scratch our nails against…. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. ” In June 1953, she was diagnosed with depression and was prescribed electroshock therapy which was thought to the best treatment for her.
While undergoing treatment, she developed acute insomnia where she did not sleep for three weeks and became immune to sleeping pills. On August 24, 1953, Plath broke into the family lockbox to steal the sleeping pills that had been taken away from her when she was left alone for the day. She left a note that she was going for a long walk, entered a crawl space under the porch through the cellar and swallowed approximately forty pills. An all out search was launched when her family discovered her missing with everyone searching as far as Boston.
Plath was finally discovered two days later on August 26 when someone heard her moaning from the cellar. She was rushed to the hospital in a semi-comatose state. She was admitted to McClean Hospital’s mental institution at Belmont where she worked with a female psychiatrist. Electroshock treatments were once again prescribed and seemed to be effective in lifting her ever-present depression just before Christmas. She was released in January and returned to Smith College to resume her studies. She graduated in June summa cum laude, with a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge to study literature in the fall.
At Cambridge, Plath spent time in London and at her new college making friends, dating, and touring. Her stressful schedule caused chronic illnesses and sinus infections. She spent Christmas and New Year’s in France and Italy with an old American boyfriend. She wanted to intensify the relationship while he was dating another woman seriously. This brought back memories and pain of the loss of her father and she once again fell into depression. In early 1956, Plath met Ted Hughes at a launch party for a new Cambridge literary magazine, St. Botolph’s Review.
She spent a night with Hughes and his friend in a London flat on her way to a spring vacation in Europe. She spent even more time with Hughes after she returned. After a couple of months the two were discussing marriage. Hughes and Plath were married, secretly so they didn’t jeopardize Sylvia’s academic career or fellowship grant, on June 6, 1956, while her mother was visiting in the Church of Saint George the Martyr in London. She spent the summer in Paris, Madrid, and Benindorm, Spain on the coast writing, studying, swimming, and enjoying the quiet towns with Ted. They returned to England in August.
There is some mystery as to her whereabouts in September but was back in Cambridge by October. They learned that their marriage would not harm her fellowship grant so they began lively openly in Cambridge. Plath was offered a teaching position at Smith College and they returned to America in June. Plath began teaching in September but soon found the work tedious and overwhelming. Under the increasing emotional stress she lost the desire to write. Sylvia declined the option to continue teaching the next semester. In December 1959, Plath found out she was pregnant so she and Ted sailed once again for England.
After staying with Ted’s family, they moved into a tiny flat in London in February 1960. Sylvia gave birth to a baby girl on April 1. The baby was named Frieda after Plath’s paternal aunt. The Colossus, Plath’s first book of poems, was published in October. In January 1961, Plath learned she was pregnant again but miscarried on February 2. At the end of the month, she underwent surgery to have her appendix removed. In August, Plath discovered that she was pregnant again as they prepared to move to Devon. On January 17, 1962, Plath gave birth to a boy whom they named Nicholas.
Plath became distressed when she noticed that Ted seemed disappointed that the new baby was a boy and was increasingly standoffish to the child in the weeks that followed. She developed a habit of writing in the quiet hours of the morning while the baby slept. In July of 1962, Sylvia found out that Ted was having an affair. She proceeded to burn his letters, rough drafts and poems, and letters from her mother in anger. ” she had skimmed from his desk “Ted’s scum”, microscopic bits of fingernail parings, dandruff, dead skin, hair, and then, with a random handful of papers collected from the desk. e stepped back to a prescribed point, lit the fire with a long stick of a torch and paced around. ” (Butscher 85)
In September, Sylvia and Ted went to Ireland in an attempt to reconcile their marriage. It ended disastrously when Ted packed and left three days before the end of their trip. In October, Ted packed his things and moved from the house. He told Sylvia that he and his mistress had speculated that she already would have already tried to kill herself and that it would be easier if she had because then he could sell the house and take Frieda.
Just before leaving he told Plath that he had hated living with her and had wanted to leave for years. ” (Neurotic Poets) Plath gave the impression to friends that she was dealing with the breakup of her marriage well by writing poetry at an extraordinary pace. But as evidenced in her journals she was not dealing well, “I hated men because they didn’t stay around and love me like a father: I could prick holes in them & show they were no-father material. I made them propose then showed them they hadn’t a chance.
I hated men because they didn’t have to suffer like a woman did. They could die or go to Spain. They could have fur wile another woman had birth pangsMen, nasty lousy men. ” (Plath 268) In December she moved her and her children back to a flat in London. At Christmas, friends and family suspected that Plath secretly hoped for a reunion in spite of her claims that she was happy to be rid of him and that she was undergoing a severe emotional crisis. The January weather was horrible in London and only added to Plath’s worsening depression.
Her doctor attempted for several weeks to find her a bed in the over-full hospitals. “In the early morning of February 11, 1963, however, Plath set some bread and milk in the children’s room then cracked their window and sealed their door off with tape. She went downstairs and, after sealing herself into the kitchen, knelt in front of the open oven and turned the gas on. Her body was discovered that morning by a nurse scheduled to visit and the construction worker who helped her get into the house. The depression had overcome.
Just six months before her death she wrote the feeling “Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helplessness numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers’ beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass. ” (Neurotic Poets) Plath has become more successful after her death. Most of her major works were published posthumously. She viewed death as an escape from the sadism of life and puts a grotesque spin on femininity.
She emphasizes loss of self and potential for life through such symbols as miscarriage and menstruation. In her opinion, infertility is equated with selfishness and worthlessness. Her poems were of obsessions, hatred, and suicidal tendencies. Plath is not concerned with the nature of her experiences, rather she in engaged in demonstrating the way in which the mind deals with extreme circumstances or circumstances to which it responds with excessive sensitivity.
From her earliest madwomen and hysterical virgins to the late suicides and father killers, Plath portrays characters whose strategy performances are subversions of the creative act. Plath told an interviewer, “I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with those cries from the heart. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.
Plath’s work is valuable for its ability to reach today’s reader, because of its concern with the real problems of our culture. In this age of gender conflicts, broken families, and economic inequities, Plath’s forthright language speaks loudly about the anger of being both betrayed and powerless. She was hailed as literary symbol of the women’s rights movement and a feminist writer of great significance. Sylvia Plath began by creating art that imitated life, but ended when life imitated art.
