Chapter-1
Sylvia Plath by Nidhi Mehta
In America, attitudes about poetry began to change even before this time as Walt Whitman wrote about his emotional experiences. Then Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams carried on the tradition in the beginning of the twentieth century and more poets began to directly express emotions from a subjective point of view. Though previous movements and poets have focused on emotions, the poems were still reserved and limited to publicly acceptable subject matter. It was not until the late 1950’s that poetry began treating the self frankly, without restraints, was pushed to the extremes, and became a strong force in literature. At that time, three poets in particular, W.D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton were writing poems about their lives including issues like divorce, insanity, suicide, extra-marital affairs and adultery and they were getting a strong, though not always approving reaction from the literary world. The poetry written by women, especially by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath was particularly shocking and revolutionary in the era of the traditional wife and homemaker.
M.L. Rosenthal and others have noted the shift from an impersonal to the personal mode of writing with the disclosure of the self in the poem as a distinctive mark of post-nineteen fifties poetry. The preposition of an organic process in poetry by the members of the Black Mountain School, the chatty casualness of the New York School, the reliance upon the intuition among the Beats and confessional provocation of a psyche-in-distress contributes to the expansive modulations of post-war poetry.
One of the major female American voices in the1950’s has been the voice of Sylvia Plath who has been variously portrayed as a fragile, brilliant immigrant’s daughter motivated by an overarching ambition. She has also been described as an unreasonable perfectionist whose outrageous demands alienated everyone who crossed her path. She has been labelled as a devoted wife and mother shattered by her idolized husband’s betrayal and lastly, she has been acclaimed as an unbalanced artist who could use and sacrifice everything, including her own life, to serve her art. Her major poetic works like The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1971), Selected Poems (1985) and Collected Poems (1981) have distinguished her as a powerful writer and within the short span of her life, her work received considerable critical attention.
Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932 as the daughter of German immigrant parents. Her father Otto Plath was a professor of Biology at Boston University, and had specialized in bees. He has been characterized as authoritarian and died of diabetes in 1940 when Plath was eight years old. His end was fraught with suffering which included the amputation of a leg. Reference to the leg is made in her celebrated poem “Daddy”. Her mother, Aurelia, worked at two jobs to support Sylvia and her brother Warren.
Plath was an excellent student and won prizes and scholarships. At seventeen, she published her first poem and her first short story. When she was not yet fifteen, the young Sylvia Plath astonished her high school English teacher, Wilbury Crockett, with a group of poems, some of which he read aloud to his tenth-grade class in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She studied at Gamaliel Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) and in 1950 she was accepted into Smith College on a scholarship. Praise at home and prizes at school were threads she was already adeptly weaving into a web of happiness she instinctively knew to be vulnerable. From within, the high school girl felt menaced by inklings of duality and fragility: ‘‘How frail the human heart must be, a mirrored pool of thought,”10 she wrote, already reaching for the images of pool, mirror, and beating heart that would later haunt her mature poems. She sensed that the world could hurt her badly if she was not careful to conceal her true feelings and earn its admiration by meticulous conformity to its requirements. Sylvia’s strategy was always to do better than was required. As she was different, it was essential to appear more than normal.
In her writing, Sylvia made the most of every scrap of personal experience she thought she could use for literary material. That high school initiation later went into a short story called “Initiation”, which won her a $200 prize and publication in a magazine in January 1953, when she was a junior in college. By the time, Sylvia was a senior in high school she was already dependent on writing and success in publishing. She was at the top of her class and should logically have been happy. That was not the case. She lived in fear that it would be found out that she was not the perfectly happy person she tried to project. Haunted by a fear of her own disintegration, she kept herself together by defining herself, writing constantly about herself, so that everybody could see her there, fighting and conquering an outside world that forever threatened her frail being. In Letters Home (1975) edited by Plath’s mother, she revealed a portrait of a young woman driven by hopes for the highest success alternating with the moods of deep depression. As a family, the Plath’s were culturally aspiring and ambitious, staunchly liberal in outlook, steeped in Emersonian ideals of loyalty, hard work, self-reliance, and puritan optimism. In early childhood, Sylvia was the center of her father’s attention, while Warren a sickly baby afflicted with asthma and bronchitis, absorbed most of his mother’s time. Almost all of Sylvia’s childhood writings reflect the Horatio Alger* ethic of the era: happiness is the right of everyone, to be achieved through hard work; success is the reward for work; and fame and money are the measure of success. (*named after a 19th century prolific American author) Sylvia imbibed this philosophy at school as well as at home and throughout her life.
When Plath was eight years old, her father died and they “moved away from the sea which dramatically sealed him in a moonstruck, glassed-in compartment of Sylvia’s imagination, where he evolved into his godlike/devil like manifestations, stripped of reality-the frightening ghost of a father she had scarcely known as a healthy man.”11 Eventually, the poet in Sylvia, reduced that time to a figure in a delicately constructed work of art - a ship in a bottle, described at the end of her radio script “Ocean 1212- W” in 1962: “beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.” 12 Yet in her dreams, and in her peculiarly hallucinatory imagination, it was not so easy to bury Otto Plath under glass. Inexorably he would emerge from the shadow side of Sylvia’s stories and poems as the Proteus of her Herculean effort to free herself of his image. Menacingly, irresistibly, he would reappear in her work as a Colossus, a seagod-muse, a drowned suicide, an archetypal Greek king, a beekeeper, even, as in the famous poem “Daddy”, a fictitiously brutal combination of husband and Luftwaffe Nazi:
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You- CP, 223.
She entered Smith College on a scholarship, but she became increasingly filled with apprehensions of horror and death, and obsessed with a sense of isolation and entrapment. She had gone around for most of her life as if in the rarified atmosphere under a bell jar. In 1952, she won the first prize of $500 from Mademoiselle Magazine for her short story “Sunday at the Mintons”. In the following June of 1953, Sylvia was a guest editor at Mademoiselle’s New York offices, which she later wrote about in The Bell Jar. She came home from New York in a state of exhaustion and depression. She was counting on being accepted into Frank O’Connor’s creative writing course at Harvard and when she was not, she went into a state of withdrawal. She was distraught, scared inside, unable to sleep or function, but still determined to show the world a brave face. Unable to reconcile her inner and external worlds, she was briefly hospitalized for intense psychiatric therapy on August 24; she was institutionalized at MacLean hospital and was treated with insulin therapy and shock treatment. During this period of hospitalization, Sylvia unknowingly was collecting material for her novel The Bell Jar, and the short story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”.
She described this period of her life in The Bell Jar, her autobiographical novel, which was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, a month before her death. The novel describes New York at the height of the Cold War, during the hot summer in which the Rosenbergs were sent to the electric chair, convicted of spying for the Soviets. Against this background, Plath sets the story of the breakdown and near-death of her heroine. This book is a powerful exploration of the restricted role of women. With J.D. Salinger’s The Cather in the Rye, it is recognized as a classic of adolescent angst.
After winning a Fulbright scholarship, Plath attended Newnham College, Cambridge (England). She received a fellowship to Cambridge University, where she took her M.A. degree in 1957. After a series of going nowhere relationships and numerous blind dates, Sylvia met Ted Hughes at a St. Botolph’s party on February 25, 1956. As she described him “… big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me,”13 whom she married next year. Hughes’ first impression was “American legs / simply went on up. That flaring hand, / Those long, balletic, monkey / elegant fingers. /And the face—a tight ball of joy.” 14 They first met at a student party, where she bit Hughes on the cheek, hard, which set the tone to their tumultuous relationship. Ted Hughes describes the details of their wedding beautifully in his poem “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress” in Birthday Letters. Plath decided to be a good wife, but Hughes was not the ideal husband she imagined: he was moody, with a penchant for nose picking, and dressed slovenly.
After the conclusion of her studies at Cambridge in the spring of 1957, Sylvia was asked to teach English at Smith College, where she had taken her undergraduate courses. Sylvia returned to America, bringing her husband with her. Her mother, Aurelia Plath, made them a present of a vacation to Cape Cod. Sylvia was excited at the prospect of teaching English, an obviously favourite subject. The preparatory work was exhausting, as was her lot, she must be brilliant and make it look as “easy as pie.” She was sick frequently and most unhappy. When the year was over, she did not return. The college was very satisfied with Sylvia’s performance, but Sylvia felt she had failed and she would not go back for another year. Already Sylvia was beginning to have doubts about Ted’s love for her. She needed constantly to be reassured. Sylvia took a less taxing clerical position as a receptionist in the psychiatric clinic of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and continued with her writing. She also attended an evening poetry class, which was given by Robert Lowell, whose confessional style influenced Sylvia’s poetry. In early December 1958, she secretly began to see Ruth Boucher, her therapist from McLean, where she had been hospitalized after her earlier suicide attempt in the summer of 1953. At the age of twenty-five Sylvia was confident, boastful, a threat to her contemporaries while drawing comparisons, when in an interview in The Journals of Sylvia Plath edited by Ted Hughes in March 1958 she declared: “Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be the ‘Poetess of America’. Who rivals? Well, in history Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson- all dead. Now Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore- the ageing giantesses and Adrienne Rich- she will soon be eclipsed by my eight poems: I am eager, chaffing, sure of my gift, wanting only to train and teach it- I’ll count the magazines and money I break open by these eight best poems ...”15
Plath’s early poetry is based on the current styles of refined and ironic verse of that time. Under the influence of her husband and the work of Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she developed her writing skills. In December 1959, Sylvia and Ted returned to England, she got pregnant and gave birth to their first child in the spring of 1960. On April 1st, Frieda Rebecca was born. Their first child’s birth gave Sylvia a new insight into life, and enough inspiration for some new poems and stories. Still, her feeling of paranoia never fully abated. She was always afraid that Ted would leave her for a more glamorous or intelligent woman, these insecurities probably stemming from her fathers’ death when she was a child. This led to a later outburst when Ted used to come home late. Once in a bout of rage Sylvia tore up his books, plays and other works, turning the pages into fluff. The reason behind her malicious act was her suspicion about Ted having an affair. Other instances of wacky behavior by Sylvia occurred; when it seemed like Ted was being talked to more than her in the company of friends, Sylvia became furious, demanding his and only his attention. Lucas Myers says “that it seemed like Sylvia was trying to swallow him whole.” 16
During her pregnancy, on February 10, Sylvia signed a contract with William Heinemann Ltd. to publish The Colossus, her first book of poetry, which was to come out in October 1960 and which later was acclaimed by critics for its range of linguistic and stylistic brilliance. Both Plath and Hughes loved writing so much but it seemed that their views on it were completely different. Lucas Myers, friend of the Hughes’s has said, “Sylvia was determined that it should be read. Ted was determined that it should exist.”17 Outwardly, Sylvia showed amazing energy. She scoured and scrubbed their London flat, wanting a pretty home for herself, her husband and their yet to be born baby. Inwardly, she felt circumstances pressed on her.
Her life and her poetry are intertwined to such an extent so as to lose content and perception of all outer things and outer life, even at the cost of getting irrevocably isolated. Out of this fatigue of isolation and a terrible growing insecurity thereof, she holds out her hand to death, thus wishing to transcend life and its agony, of which her poetry is the expression. Moreover, she does transcend the boundaries of her self, her terribly lonely life and social context and all those devices that assimilate to make poetry out of experience.
She wanted everything, and writing was her outlet and her curse. It was both her salvation and her undoing. In the following February of 1961, a miscarriage left Sylvia feeling depressed. She wrote of it in a poem “Parliament Hill Fields”. In August 1961, the Hughes’ family moved to a Devon farm and Sylvia was isolated. Ted had become more removed from her. A son Nicholas Farrar was born on January 17, 1962. The next year, appeared her well-known poems, the aggressive “LadyLazarus”and the notorious “Daddy”, in which Plath expanded the boundaries of intimate expression:
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you. CP, 223.
When Ted Hughes abandoned her for another woman, Assia Gutmann Wevill, the wife of the Canadian poet David Wevill, fantasies of self-destruction took over Plath’s imagination. Towards the end of her life, Plath burnt off pages of a work in progress. Finally, in August 1962, Sylvia moved out with her children and filed for divorce. She moved into an apartment at 23 Fitzroy Road, which was the former home of the poet William Butler Yeats.
In the first few months of the divorce, Sylvia stayed cheerfully optimistic, claiming to be writing the best poems of her life. These poems are now called the Ariel poems. Unfortunately, her positive outlook could not last for long. In one of her final poems, “Lady Lazarus”, the obsession with death surfaces again:
Dying is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well. CP, 245.
She had begun to write obsessively about death for two reasons. First, when she and her husband separated, however mutual the arrangement, she went through the same piercing grief and bereavement she had felt as a child when her father had died. Secondly, she thought her car crash the previous summer, had set her free. She had paid her dues, qualified as a survivor and could now write about it. This is a valuable clue to the understanding of the, agonizing oscillations of Sylvia’s spirit between death and rebirth, annihilation and reconstruction of her soul, in a sense, ultimately between life and death. “The more she wrote about death, the more fertile her imaginative world became and this gave her everything to live.” 18
The Ariel poems composed during this period reflect her renewed sense of the ungovernable chaos of human experience and her frightening visions of violence and horror. In a letter to her mother Plath complained that Hughes had left her in poverty, but according to Elaine Feinstein, whose well-balanced on Hughes appeared in 2001, he gave her all their joint savings. She writes: “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous 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. As if a great, muscular owl was sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart”.19
After few days, she suffered a similar breakdown as she had in her Smith years and ended her life in London on February11, 1963. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning from her oven. Her gravestone is in Yorkshire. Tragically, Assia Wevill (Hughes’ girlfriend) killed herself in the same manner as Plath- by gassing herself to death. She also killed their daughter, Shura.
Plaths’ Collected Poems (1981), assembled and edited by Ted Hughes, won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Her journals appeared in 1982 heavily edited by Hughes, who explained that he wanted to spare the children further distress. Feminist critics have suspected that Hughes tried to protect himself. But when Karen V. Kukil assembled the unabridged journal published in 2000, critics doubted the ethics of dutifully revealing Plath’s unrevised work with grammatical errors and mis-spellings.
Plaths’ literary reputation rests mainly on her carefully crafted pieces of poetry, particularly the verse that she composed in the months leading up to her death. Plath has been considered a deeply honest writer, whose self- scrutiny has given a unique point of view to psychological disorder and to the theme of the feminist- martyr in a patriarchal society.
“Success for Sylvia came in death, the journey from Sylvia Plath, the gifted young girl to Sylvia Plath the poet and writer, was tumultuous and brilliant, and robbed the world of a transcendent artisan far before her time.”20
Ironically, Sylvia is quoted in Letters Home in a letter to her mother as saying, “I shall be one of the few women poets in the world who is fully a rejoicing woman, not a bitter or frustrated or warped man-imitator, which ruins most of them in the end. I am a woman and glad of it and my songs will be of fertility, the earth, and the people in it through waste, sorrow and death. I shall be a woman singer, and Ted and I shall make a fine life together .…”21
The work of Sylvia Plath represents intense private feelings made public with a grotesque clarity. Her poetry has been praised as a supreme example of the confessional mode in modern literature and disparaged as “the longest suicide note ever written.” 22
There was a tremendous power in the burning look of her dark eyes; she came conquering and to conquer. She badly wanted to be compassionate and even through her agonies she forced herself to be a little kind. There were, of course, many fine impulses and a most commendable initiative in her nature; but everything in her seemed to be perceptually seeking its equilibrium and not finding it: everything was in chaos, in a state of agitation and restlessness. Perhaps the demands she made upon herself were too severe and she was unable to find in herself the necessary strength to satisfy them. Therefore, one may conclude, that Sylvia Plath was a brilliant and potent lyric poet. Plath herself, or a fictional figure bearing Plath’s name, has become a modern totem, a symbolic figure of angry suffering whose precise import shifts according to the needs of her readers.
Sylvia Plath, the golden-haired girl of Smith College, the suicidal heroine of The Bell Jar, and the brilliant, anguished author of four volumes of scintillating verse, has become both a myth and a reality in contemporary American literature within a pace of seven decades. She is remembered with a sense of shattering sorrow and rueful repentance over her premature and unnatural death .Whatever might have been the reasons for her committing suicide, we pity her for this uncouth act, which deprived the academic world of a rich harvest of English poetry that was naturally expected of her. Nevertheless, whatever meager quantity of verse she has left behind is enough to guarantee her a place besides the modern immortals in English letters. Her writings, including her novel and letters, are overlaid with the autobiographical details which leap up like a tongue of fire and capture the reader’s attention immediately. In one of her letters, Olive H. Prouty rightly communicates to her:
I am very proud of you, Sylvia I love telling
your story. Someone remarked to me after
reading your poem in the Atlantic, “How
intense”. Sometime write me a little poem that
isn’t intense. A lamp turned too high might
shatter its chimney. Please just glow
sometimes.23
Obviously, too much of ‘intensity’ or ‘feverishness’ is the hallmark of Plath’s poetry. It may pose problems of understanding and interpretation for the casual reader, but it also leads her to an unmistakable individuality as a poet, letting her work evolve itself into definite artistic forms and patterns.
M.L. Rosenthal and others have noted the shift from an impersonal to the personal mode of writing with the disclosure of the self in the poem as a distinctive mark of post-nineteen fifties poetry. The preposition of an organic process in poetry by the members of the Black Mountain School, the chatty casualness of the New York School, the reliance upon the intuition among the Beats and confessional provocation of a psyche-in-distress contributes to the expansive modulations of post-war poetry.
One of the major female American voices in the1950’s has been the voice of Sylvia Plath who has been variously portrayed as a fragile, brilliant immigrant’s daughter motivated by an overarching ambition. She has also been described as an unreasonable perfectionist whose outrageous demands alienated everyone who crossed her path. She has been labelled as a devoted wife and mother shattered by her idolized husband’s betrayal and lastly, she has been acclaimed as an unbalanced artist who could use and sacrifice everything, including her own life, to serve her art. Her major poetic works like The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1971), Selected Poems (1985) and Collected Poems (1981) have distinguished her as a powerful writer and within the short span of her life, her work received considerable critical attention.
Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932 as the daughter of German immigrant parents. Her father Otto Plath was a professor of Biology at Boston University, and had specialized in bees. He has been characterized as authoritarian and died of diabetes in 1940 when Plath was eight years old. His end was fraught with suffering which included the amputation of a leg. Reference to the leg is made in her celebrated poem “Daddy”. Her mother, Aurelia, worked at two jobs to support Sylvia and her brother Warren.
Plath was an excellent student and won prizes and scholarships. At seventeen, she published her first poem and her first short story. When she was not yet fifteen, the young Sylvia Plath astonished her high school English teacher, Wilbury Crockett, with a group of poems, some of which he read aloud to his tenth-grade class in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She studied at Gamaliel Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) and in 1950 she was accepted into Smith College on a scholarship. Praise at home and prizes at school were threads she was already adeptly weaving into a web of happiness she instinctively knew to be vulnerable. From within, the high school girl felt menaced by inklings of duality and fragility: ‘‘How frail the human heart must be, a mirrored pool of thought,”10 she wrote, already reaching for the images of pool, mirror, and beating heart that would later haunt her mature poems. She sensed that the world could hurt her badly if she was not careful to conceal her true feelings and earn its admiration by meticulous conformity to its requirements. Sylvia’s strategy was always to do better than was required. As she was different, it was essential to appear more than normal.
In her writing, Sylvia made the most of every scrap of personal experience she thought she could use for literary material. That high school initiation later went into a short story called “Initiation”, which won her a $200 prize and publication in a magazine in January 1953, when she was a junior in college. By the time, Sylvia was a senior in high school she was already dependent on writing and success in publishing. She was at the top of her class and should logically have been happy. That was not the case. She lived in fear that it would be found out that she was not the perfectly happy person she tried to project. Haunted by a fear of her own disintegration, she kept herself together by defining herself, writing constantly about herself, so that everybody could see her there, fighting and conquering an outside world that forever threatened her frail being. In Letters Home (1975) edited by Plath’s mother, she revealed a portrait of a young woman driven by hopes for the highest success alternating with the moods of deep depression. As a family, the Plath’s were culturally aspiring and ambitious, staunchly liberal in outlook, steeped in Emersonian ideals of loyalty, hard work, self-reliance, and puritan optimism. In early childhood, Sylvia was the center of her father’s attention, while Warren a sickly baby afflicted with asthma and bronchitis, absorbed most of his mother’s time. Almost all of Sylvia’s childhood writings reflect the Horatio Alger* ethic of the era: happiness is the right of everyone, to be achieved through hard work; success is the reward for work; and fame and money are the measure of success. (*named after a 19th century prolific American author) Sylvia imbibed this philosophy at school as well as at home and throughout her life.
When Plath was eight years old, her father died and they “moved away from the sea which dramatically sealed him in a moonstruck, glassed-in compartment of Sylvia’s imagination, where he evolved into his godlike/devil like manifestations, stripped of reality-the frightening ghost of a father she had scarcely known as a healthy man.”11 Eventually, the poet in Sylvia, reduced that time to a figure in a delicately constructed work of art - a ship in a bottle, described at the end of her radio script “Ocean 1212- W” in 1962: “beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.” 12 Yet in her dreams, and in her peculiarly hallucinatory imagination, it was not so easy to bury Otto Plath under glass. Inexorably he would emerge from the shadow side of Sylvia’s stories and poems as the Proteus of her Herculean effort to free herself of his image. Menacingly, irresistibly, he would reappear in her work as a Colossus, a seagod-muse, a drowned suicide, an archetypal Greek king, a beekeeper, even, as in the famous poem “Daddy”, a fictitiously brutal combination of husband and Luftwaffe Nazi:
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You- CP, 223.
She entered Smith College on a scholarship, but she became increasingly filled with apprehensions of horror and death, and obsessed with a sense of isolation and entrapment. She had gone around for most of her life as if in the rarified atmosphere under a bell jar. In 1952, she won the first prize of $500 from Mademoiselle Magazine for her short story “Sunday at the Mintons”. In the following June of 1953, Sylvia was a guest editor at Mademoiselle’s New York offices, which she later wrote about in The Bell Jar. She came home from New York in a state of exhaustion and depression. She was counting on being accepted into Frank O’Connor’s creative writing course at Harvard and when she was not, she went into a state of withdrawal. She was distraught, scared inside, unable to sleep or function, but still determined to show the world a brave face. Unable to reconcile her inner and external worlds, she was briefly hospitalized for intense psychiatric therapy on August 24; she was institutionalized at MacLean hospital and was treated with insulin therapy and shock treatment. During this period of hospitalization, Sylvia unknowingly was collecting material for her novel The Bell Jar, and the short story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”.
She described this period of her life in The Bell Jar, her autobiographical novel, which was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, a month before her death. The novel describes New York at the height of the Cold War, during the hot summer in which the Rosenbergs were sent to the electric chair, convicted of spying for the Soviets. Against this background, Plath sets the story of the breakdown and near-death of her heroine. This book is a powerful exploration of the restricted role of women. With J.D. Salinger’s The Cather in the Rye, it is recognized as a classic of adolescent angst.
After winning a Fulbright scholarship, Plath attended Newnham College, Cambridge (England). She received a fellowship to Cambridge University, where she took her M.A. degree in 1957. After a series of going nowhere relationships and numerous blind dates, Sylvia met Ted Hughes at a St. Botolph’s party on February 25, 1956. As she described him “… big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me,”13 whom she married next year. Hughes’ first impression was “American legs / simply went on up. That flaring hand, / Those long, balletic, monkey / elegant fingers. /And the face—a tight ball of joy.” 14 They first met at a student party, where she bit Hughes on the cheek, hard, which set the tone to their tumultuous relationship. Ted Hughes describes the details of their wedding beautifully in his poem “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress” in Birthday Letters. Plath decided to be a good wife, but Hughes was not the ideal husband she imagined: he was moody, with a penchant for nose picking, and dressed slovenly.
After the conclusion of her studies at Cambridge in the spring of 1957, Sylvia was asked to teach English at Smith College, where she had taken her undergraduate courses. Sylvia returned to America, bringing her husband with her. Her mother, Aurelia Plath, made them a present of a vacation to Cape Cod. Sylvia was excited at the prospect of teaching English, an obviously favourite subject. The preparatory work was exhausting, as was her lot, she must be brilliant and make it look as “easy as pie.” She was sick frequently and most unhappy. When the year was over, she did not return. The college was very satisfied with Sylvia’s performance, but Sylvia felt she had failed and she would not go back for another year. Already Sylvia was beginning to have doubts about Ted’s love for her. She needed constantly to be reassured. Sylvia took a less taxing clerical position as a receptionist in the psychiatric clinic of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and continued with her writing. She also attended an evening poetry class, which was given by Robert Lowell, whose confessional style influenced Sylvia’s poetry. In early December 1958, she secretly began to see Ruth Boucher, her therapist from McLean, where she had been hospitalized after her earlier suicide attempt in the summer of 1953. At the age of twenty-five Sylvia was confident, boastful, a threat to her contemporaries while drawing comparisons, when in an interview in The Journals of Sylvia Plath edited by Ted Hughes in March 1958 she declared: “Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be the ‘Poetess of America’. Who rivals? Well, in history Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson- all dead. Now Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore- the ageing giantesses and Adrienne Rich- she will soon be eclipsed by my eight poems: I am eager, chaffing, sure of my gift, wanting only to train and teach it- I’ll count the magazines and money I break open by these eight best poems ...”15
Plath’s early poetry is based on the current styles of refined and ironic verse of that time. Under the influence of her husband and the work of Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she developed her writing skills. In December 1959, Sylvia and Ted returned to England, she got pregnant and gave birth to their first child in the spring of 1960. On April 1st, Frieda Rebecca was born. Their first child’s birth gave Sylvia a new insight into life, and enough inspiration for some new poems and stories. Still, her feeling of paranoia never fully abated. She was always afraid that Ted would leave her for a more glamorous or intelligent woman, these insecurities probably stemming from her fathers’ death when she was a child. This led to a later outburst when Ted used to come home late. Once in a bout of rage Sylvia tore up his books, plays and other works, turning the pages into fluff. The reason behind her malicious act was her suspicion about Ted having an affair. Other instances of wacky behavior by Sylvia occurred; when it seemed like Ted was being talked to more than her in the company of friends, Sylvia became furious, demanding his and only his attention. Lucas Myers says “that it seemed like Sylvia was trying to swallow him whole.” 16
During her pregnancy, on February 10, Sylvia signed a contract with William Heinemann Ltd. to publish The Colossus, her first book of poetry, which was to come out in October 1960 and which later was acclaimed by critics for its range of linguistic and stylistic brilliance. Both Plath and Hughes loved writing so much but it seemed that their views on it were completely different. Lucas Myers, friend of the Hughes’s has said, “Sylvia was determined that it should be read. Ted was determined that it should exist.”17 Outwardly, Sylvia showed amazing energy. She scoured and scrubbed their London flat, wanting a pretty home for herself, her husband and their yet to be born baby. Inwardly, she felt circumstances pressed on her.
Her life and her poetry are intertwined to such an extent so as to lose content and perception of all outer things and outer life, even at the cost of getting irrevocably isolated. Out of this fatigue of isolation and a terrible growing insecurity thereof, she holds out her hand to death, thus wishing to transcend life and its agony, of which her poetry is the expression. Moreover, she does transcend the boundaries of her self, her terribly lonely life and social context and all those devices that assimilate to make poetry out of experience.
She wanted everything, and writing was her outlet and her curse. It was both her salvation and her undoing. In the following February of 1961, a miscarriage left Sylvia feeling depressed. She wrote of it in a poem “Parliament Hill Fields”. In August 1961, the Hughes’ family moved to a Devon farm and Sylvia was isolated. Ted had become more removed from her. A son Nicholas Farrar was born on January 17, 1962. The next year, appeared her well-known poems, the aggressive “LadyLazarus”and the notorious “Daddy”, in which Plath expanded the boundaries of intimate expression:
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you. CP, 223.
When Ted Hughes abandoned her for another woman, Assia Gutmann Wevill, the wife of the Canadian poet David Wevill, fantasies of self-destruction took over Plath’s imagination. Towards the end of her life, Plath burnt off pages of a work in progress. Finally, in August 1962, Sylvia moved out with her children and filed for divorce. She moved into an apartment at 23 Fitzroy Road, which was the former home of the poet William Butler Yeats.
In the first few months of the divorce, Sylvia stayed cheerfully optimistic, claiming to be writing the best poems of her life. These poems are now called the Ariel poems. Unfortunately, her positive outlook could not last for long. In one of her final poems, “Lady Lazarus”, the obsession with death surfaces again:
Dying is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well. CP, 245.
She had begun to write obsessively about death for two reasons. First, when she and her husband separated, however mutual the arrangement, she went through the same piercing grief and bereavement she had felt as a child when her father had died. Secondly, she thought her car crash the previous summer, had set her free. She had paid her dues, qualified as a survivor and could now write about it. This is a valuable clue to the understanding of the, agonizing oscillations of Sylvia’s spirit between death and rebirth, annihilation and reconstruction of her soul, in a sense, ultimately between life and death. “The more she wrote about death, the more fertile her imaginative world became and this gave her everything to live.” 18
The Ariel poems composed during this period reflect her renewed sense of the ungovernable chaos of human experience and her frightening visions of violence and horror. In a letter to her mother Plath complained that Hughes had left her in poverty, but according to Elaine Feinstein, whose well-balanced on Hughes appeared in 2001, he gave her all their joint savings. She writes: “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous 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. As if a great, muscular owl was sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart”.19
After few days, she suffered a similar breakdown as she had in her Smith years and ended her life in London on February11, 1963. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning from her oven. Her gravestone is in Yorkshire. Tragically, Assia Wevill (Hughes’ girlfriend) killed herself in the same manner as Plath- by gassing herself to death. She also killed their daughter, Shura.
Plaths’ Collected Poems (1981), assembled and edited by Ted Hughes, won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Her journals appeared in 1982 heavily edited by Hughes, who explained that he wanted to spare the children further distress. Feminist critics have suspected that Hughes tried to protect himself. But when Karen V. Kukil assembled the unabridged journal published in 2000, critics doubted the ethics of dutifully revealing Plath’s unrevised work with grammatical errors and mis-spellings.
Plaths’ literary reputation rests mainly on her carefully crafted pieces of poetry, particularly the verse that she composed in the months leading up to her death. Plath has been considered a deeply honest writer, whose self- scrutiny has given a unique point of view to psychological disorder and to the theme of the feminist- martyr in a patriarchal society.
“Success for Sylvia came in death, the journey from Sylvia Plath, the gifted young girl to Sylvia Plath the poet and writer, was tumultuous and brilliant, and robbed the world of a transcendent artisan far before her time.”20
Ironically, Sylvia is quoted in Letters Home in a letter to her mother as saying, “I shall be one of the few women poets in the world who is fully a rejoicing woman, not a bitter or frustrated or warped man-imitator, which ruins most of them in the end. I am a woman and glad of it and my songs will be of fertility, the earth, and the people in it through waste, sorrow and death. I shall be a woman singer, and Ted and I shall make a fine life together .…”21
The work of Sylvia Plath represents intense private feelings made public with a grotesque clarity. Her poetry has been praised as a supreme example of the confessional mode in modern literature and disparaged as “the longest suicide note ever written.” 22
There was a tremendous power in the burning look of her dark eyes; she came conquering and to conquer. She badly wanted to be compassionate and even through her agonies she forced herself to be a little kind. There were, of course, many fine impulses and a most commendable initiative in her nature; but everything in her seemed to be perceptually seeking its equilibrium and not finding it: everything was in chaos, in a state of agitation and restlessness. Perhaps the demands she made upon herself were too severe and she was unable to find in herself the necessary strength to satisfy them. Therefore, one may conclude, that Sylvia Plath was a brilliant and potent lyric poet. Plath herself, or a fictional figure bearing Plath’s name, has become a modern totem, a symbolic figure of angry suffering whose precise import shifts according to the needs of her readers.
Sylvia Plath, the golden-haired girl of Smith College, the suicidal heroine of The Bell Jar, and the brilliant, anguished author of four volumes of scintillating verse, has become both a myth and a reality in contemporary American literature within a pace of seven decades. She is remembered with a sense of shattering sorrow and rueful repentance over her premature and unnatural death .Whatever might have been the reasons for her committing suicide, we pity her for this uncouth act, which deprived the academic world of a rich harvest of English poetry that was naturally expected of her. Nevertheless, whatever meager quantity of verse she has left behind is enough to guarantee her a place besides the modern immortals in English letters. Her writings, including her novel and letters, are overlaid with the autobiographical details which leap up like a tongue of fire and capture the reader’s attention immediately. In one of her letters, Olive H. Prouty rightly communicates to her:
I am very proud of you, Sylvia I love telling
your story. Someone remarked to me after
reading your poem in the Atlantic, “How
intense”. Sometime write me a little poem that
isn’t intense. A lamp turned too high might
shatter its chimney. Please just glow
sometimes.23
Obviously, too much of ‘intensity’ or ‘feverishness’ is the hallmark of Plath’s poetry. It may pose problems of understanding and interpretation for the casual reader, but it also leads her to an unmistakable individuality as a poet, letting her work evolve itself into definite artistic forms and patterns.
