Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Importance to American Literature and History

Sylvia Plath’s importance in American history is derived from the literary excellency of her writings and her works help in “illuminating the personal and professional obstacles faced by women in the mid-twentieth century.”¹ Her significance comes from “her carefully crafted pieces of poetry” and the ways in which her writing opened the door for exploration of a “feminist-martyr” to patriarchal society, as well as the treatment of psychiatric patients, in the mid-twentieth century.² As a post-World War Two, confessional poet, or a poet who wrote based on a personal attachment to the works, Plath’s life can be explored through her work.³ By aligning the many works of Sylvia Plath alongside the major events in her life, one is better able to understand her biography and importance to American history.

Before the age of eight, Plath led a mostly normal life. Born October of 1932, she grew up in a strongly academic environment in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Winthrop and the surrounding areas appeared specifically in her poem, “Point Shirley,” which represents the town with“bleakness.”⁴ Her father, Otto Plath, was a professor of Biology and her mother, Aurelia Plath, was short-hand teacher, with a degree in English.⁵ Plath had her first poem published in The Boston Herald in 1940 when she was only eight, and this would be the beginning of her poetic career. Also in November of that year, Plath’s father died from surgical complications related to his late-diagnosed diabetes.⁶ Her paternal struggles appear in many of her poems such as “The Colossus,” “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” and especially in her later poem, “Daddy,” where Plath specifically writes about her father, saying, “I have always been scared of you.”⁷ Plath didn’t attend the funeral, and only visited her father’s grave once, nineteen years after his death.⁸

When Aurelia Plath accepted a job at Boston University, the family moved inland to Wellesley, Massachusetts. During this period, America enters into World War Two.⁹ The war would have longstanding effects on her writing. Plath makes mention of World War Two in her later poems, for example, in “The Thin People,” she describes scenes from war propaganda of the time, saying that “the thin people” were “only” from “a movie,[…]/Only in a war making evil headlines when we/Were small.”¹⁰ Plath played witness to much of the political and media output of the time, particularly the increase of war films that took place in the early nineteen-forties.¹¹ During this time, Plath also entered high school.¹² Plath had works published in her school newspaper, and even in magazines such as Seventeen and Christian Science Monitor.¹³ In 1950, Plath graduated from high school valedictorian, and she began attending Smith College in Massachusetts on a partial scholarship that next fall.¹⁴

Smith College in the 50’s was a place where “they were educating women so there would be educated children.”¹⁵ Plath attended in the earlier half of the decade, from 1950 to 1955.¹⁶During this time period, the students of Smith were stuck at an awkward juncture between women having reentered the labor force with the beginning of World War Two and the end of World War Two, when “the idea was to get women to quit their jobs so men could take them.”¹⁷ Many women opted into working a short period after school, then marrying, settling back into the pre-World War Two role of housewife.¹⁸ This time in Plath’s life was marked with indecision as she is swept up with the changing society, questioning her abilities to work and marry, writing, “would marriage sap my creative energy […] or would I achieve a fuller expression in arts as well as in the creation of children?”¹⁹ Sylvia Plath was described as “different” from the typical Smith girl of the time.²⁰ Describing her own feelings in comparisons to her peers, Plath says she does not plan to fill a “role,” or would not change for marriage, “but to go on living as an intelligent, mature human being,” mockingly pointing out the wrongful practice of woman’s “vicarious experience” lifestyle in marriage.²¹

In the summer of 1953, Plath accepted a guest editorship in New York, working forMademoiselle Magazine , a prize she had one with her short story, “Sunday at the Minton’s.”²² Plath would later write her only completed and published novel, The Bell Jar , based on the events of that June of 1953.²³ The book starts of with the line, “It was queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”²⁴ The Rosenberg trials and executions had a great impact on Plath, as she wrote in her journal that everyone around her seemed complacent, and that their lack of reactions was appalling, continuing, “nobody very much thinks about how big a human life is.”²⁵The Bell Jar is considered “a pioneering examination of societal limitations experienced by women,”²⁶ as the novel plays witness to many of the injustices that the young female character, Ethel, experienced, and her inability to accept the prescribed role of the time of becoming a submitting housewife.²⁷

Upon returning home after her month in New York, Plath was informed that she had not been accepted into a Harvard summer course she had applied for.²⁸ Later, when Aurelia Plath noticed Sylvia’s legs had “healing cuts,” and questioned her daughter, Plath admitted, "I wanted to see if I had the guts.”²⁹ Plath was immediately sent to a psychiatrist,³⁰ and was exposed to electroshock therapy for the first of many times, and “the experience of these treatments pushed her over the edge.”³¹ Also mentioned frequently in The Bell Jar , an example of Plath’s feeling on the treatments comes early in the novel, “The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick,”³² as she reflected on her own past experiences vicariously. In the novel, Plath writes, “I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant” when the main character, Ethel, is exposed to her first shock treatment.³³ It is important to note that electroshock therapy in the 1950’s was much more archaic than today; in Plath’s time doctors didn’t monitor heart rates, used higher voltages, and were excessive in prescribing it for numerous maladies, including depression.³⁴ Even today, doctors are still unsure of why or how electroshock therapy works, and it has become a infrequent practice because of its riskiness and unproven safety.³⁵

After months of shock treatments, on August 24^th, 1953, Sylvia Plath made her first suicide attempt.³⁶ The event is eerily portrayed in The Bell Jar , “I took the glass of water and the bottle of pills and went down into the cellar”³⁷ and “I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.”³⁸ In a Letter Plath wrote to a friend, Eddie Cohen, after the incident, she writes, “I underwent a rather brief and traumatic experience of badly given shock treatments […] Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide.”³⁹ Plath actually justifies her first suicide attempt based on the facts that she would be locked in a mental hospital for the rest of her life anyway, suffering similar unethical and badly performed shock treatments; all at the large expense of her family.⁴⁰

Plath was hospitalized at Mclean hospital for about six months, where she continued to undergo electroshock therapy. She returned to Smith for the Spring semester, eventually graduating summa cum laude in 1955.⁴¹ Plath received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in England the next year at Cambridge University.⁴² Within her first year in England, Plath meets her future husband, Ted Hughes, at a party. The night is infamously remembered, the two drunk and Hughes trying to kiss Plath; Plath eventually biting Hughes’s cheek so hard that “blood was running down his face.”⁴³ Plath almost immediately writes a poem titled “Pursuit,”⁴⁴in which she predicts, “One day I’ll have my death of him.”⁴⁵

By June of 1956 Plath and Hughes were married.⁴⁶ Within the next year, Plath returned to Cambridge while Hughes began teaching. The couple then moved to the United States in the summer of 1957.⁴⁷ They settled into a Boston home, where Plath had a short-lived job teaching at Smith. After one semester, the Hughes decided to give up their jobs teaching and both focus on their own writing.⁴⁸ Plath took a new job at a Massachusetts State hospital, where she worked by helping to record dreams of patients, eventually leading to her book of short stories, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams .⁴⁹ When Plath became pregnant with their first child, Frieda, Hughes decided that he would rather have the child born in England, and so in 1960 they moved into a London flat.⁵⁰ In October, Plath’s first book of poetry, TheColossus, was published in England to few reviews, though overall success, and Plath also turned in her first draft of The Bell Jar .⁵¹ Then, in February of 1961, Plath had a miscarriage with her second pregnancy, and wrote a slew of poems, one in particular called “Barren Woman.”⁵²

The family soon moves to Devon, and Plath becomes pregnant again in the summer of 1961 with her second child, Nicholas.⁵³ Over time Plath also begins to become increasingly aware of Hughes’s infidelity. In May of 1962, Plath’s The Colossus was finally published in America to sparse reviews.⁵⁴ Plath had begun writing a sequel to The Bell Jar , but when she discovered for sure in July of 1962 that Hughes was cheating on her with Assia Wevill, Plath burned the draft of the book along with hundreds of pages of other works in progress.⁵⁵

Hughes leaves Plath for Wevill in 1962.⁵⁶ With two children, an estranged husband, and a new flat in London during “the worst winter in a century,” 1962-1963, Plath became extremely depressed.⁵⁷ All of her later works, Specifically the poems in Ariel , can be linked through herconfessional style with the last few months of her life. The most prevalent theme in these works is death, and her most active period of writing began in the last year of her life.⁵⁸ Her success was decided by this last year, because “it is […] on the work written in the last eighteen months of her life that her reputation chiefly relies.”⁵⁹ Some of the more notable works of this period are “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Ariel.”⁶⁰ In October alone, Plath produced more than 25 poems.⁶¹ “Lady Lazarus” stands hauntingly in Plath’s posthumously published collection, Ariel , stating, “Dying/ Is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well.”⁶²

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself when she put her head into a gas oven after closing off her children’s rooms and leaving a note for the man on the floor below her that said to call her doctor.⁶³ The last, full poem Plath wrote, Edge , can be considered her suicide note, as it flows with a sense of being finished.⁶⁴ With the use of phrases such as “We have come so far, it is over,”⁶⁵ and words like “dead,” “Stiffens,” and “empty,”⁶⁶ the entire poem feels like it had been written by someone who had already died. Sadly, Sylvia Plath is more often recognized for her suicide than for her actual work.

Sylvia Plath’s expansion on the style of confessional poetry led her to become a major part of American literature, and the ways in which she highlighted the injustices of sex-based roles and the wrongful practices in psychiatric care make her important to all of American history. Through her confessional poems, her mostly autobiographical novel, and especially her journals and letters, Sylvia Plath unknowingly created a new style of recording social and cultural history through personal experience and metaphor.

Notes

1. Feminism in Literature, “Sylvia Plath-Introduction”; available from http://www.enotes.com/feminism-literature/plath-sylvia. Internet; accessed 16 April 2010.

2. “Poetry After WWII: Confessional Poetry; Sylvia Plath”; available from http://clorenz.tripod.com/. Internet; accessed 16 April 2010.

3. Ibid.

4. Aird, Eileen, Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 2-3.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy” in Ariel 49-51 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 50.

8. Round, Jeffery, “Sylvia Plath and Winthrop-By-The-Sea”; available from http://www.jeffreyround.com/WinthropByTheSea.php. Internet; accessed 16 April 2010.

9. Ibid.

10. Plath, Sylvia, “The Thin People”; in The Colossus, 32-34 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 32.

11. Soroka, Kristin, "The Battle Ground"; available from http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/st/~ksoroka/hollywood4.html. Internet; accessed April 16 2010).

12. Feminism in Literature, “Sylvia Plath-Introduction.”

13. Round, “Sylvia Plath and Winthrop-By-The-Sea.”

14. Neurotic Poets, “Sylvia Plath”; available from http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/. Internet; 16 April 2010.

15. Petrozziello, Allison, “Gloria Steinem on Smith in the 50’s”; available from http://www.smith.edu/newssmith/NSWint01/steinem.html. Internet; accessed 16 April 2010.

16. Feminism in Literature, “Sylvia Plath-Introduction.”

17. Petrozziello, “Gloria Steinem on Smith in the 50’s.”

18. Ibid.

19. Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Frances McCullough. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 23.

20. Petrozziello, “Gloria Steinem on Smith in the 50’s.”

21. Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 43.

22. Aird, Sylvia Plath, 6.

23. A Celebration, This Is, “Biography"; available from http://www.sylviaplath.info/biography.html. Internet; accessed 16 April 2010.

24. Plath, Sylvia, The Bell Jar (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1.

25. Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 82.

26. Feminism in Literature, “Sylvia Plath-Introduction.”

27. Ibid.

28. A Celebration, This Is, “Biography.”

29. Neurotic Poets, “Sylvia Plath.”

30. Ibid.

31. Moraski, Brittney, "The Missing Sequel: Sylvia Plath and Psychiatry”; Plath Profiles 2. (2009): 81.

32. Plath, The Bell Jar, 1.

33. Ibid., 161.

34. Behrman, Andy, “Electroshock Therapy”; available from http://www.electroboy.com/electroshocktherapy.htm. Internet; accessed 21 April 2010.

35. Ibid.

36. Moraski, “The Missing Sequel: Sylvia Plath and Psychiatry,” 81.

37. Plath, The Bell Jar, 190.

38. Ibid., 191.

39. Plath, Sylvia, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, Edited by Aurelia S. Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 130.

40. Ibid.

41. Neurotic Poets, “Sylvia Plath.”

42. A Celebration, This Is, “Biography.”

43. Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 112.

44. Neurotic Poets, “Sylvia Plath.”

45. "Sylvia Plath - Pursuit." http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1425. Internet; accessed 21 April 2010.

46. Moraski, "The Missing Sequel: Sylvia Plath and Psychiatry,” 83.

47. A Celebration, This Is, “Biography.”

48. Aird, Sylvia Plath, 8-9.

49. Moraski, “The Missing Sequel: Sylvia Plath and Psychiatry,” 83.

50. Aird, Sylvia Plath, 10-11.

51. Ibid., 11.

52. Neurotic Poets, “Sylvia Plath.”

53. Aird, Sylvia Plath, 11.

54. Neurotic Poets, “Sylvia Plath.”

55. Ibid.

56. Liukkonen, Petri, "Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) - pseudonym Victoria Lucas"; available from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/splath.htm. Internet; accessed 21 April 2010.

57. Wagner-Martin, Linda, "Two Views of Plath's Life and Career"; available from http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/m_r/plath/twoviews.htm. Internet; accessed 16 April 2010.

58. Neurotic Poets, “Sylvia Plath.”

59. Aird, Sylvia Plath, 1.

60. Ibid., 13.

61. A Celebration, This Is, “Biography.”

62. Plath, Sylvia “Lady Lazarus”; In Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 7.

63. A Celebration, This Is, “Biography.”

64. Kodrlová, Ida., and Ivo Čermák, “Precursors to Suicide in Life and Works of Sylvia Plath and Sarah Kane”; available from http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/2005/proc/kodrlova.pdf. Internet; accessed 16 2010.

65. Plath, Sylvia, “Edge”; in Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 84.

66. Ibid.