Sylvia Plath's writing documents her long struggle with mental illness and is imbued with the profound suffering that characterised almost her entire life
11 September 2006
Sylvia Plath, the America poet, committed suicide on 11 February 1963. She was just thirty years old but had already written a formidable amount of poetry and prose, much of which had been published, and an autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.
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After studying in Smith College in New England Plath came to Cambridge on a Fullbright scholarship. There she met and soon married Ted Hughes, a young poet from Yorkshire. They initially lived in London and hoped to earn enough money from their writings to stay there. With the arrival of a daughter Frieda and Sylvia pregnant with another child they decided to move to a house in Devon. After a short while in Devon, Hughes became involved with other women and subsequently left Plath and returned to London. So Hughes was the villain of the piece in my mind - forget his fine poetry, he caused us to lose Plath's future work.
This summer while visiting a friend I came across a biography of Plath by Linda Wagner-Martin. It was written without Hughes' approval but was splendidly researched and introduced me to Sylvia Plath properly. While I knew she had had mental illness at some time in her life I did not realise how profound it had been.
My friend, who had read English at college said she had always felt it was women's role in the world of the 1950s which constrained Plath's work - and indeed she frequently writes about the conflicting roles of women as wives and mothers and as career women in her case, but to me the burden of her illness made a profound effect on her work.
She suffered from what would now be described as bi-polar disorder from her late teens, perhaps earlier. Mainly, she was depressed and had terrible insomnia. But most of the time she could write not just the poetry and prose, but also letters to numerous friends, to her mother Amelia and she kept journals detailing her thoughts, which no matter how outwardly cheerful she seemed, were full of self depreciation and despair. Never were Paul Laurence Dunbar's words more true:
"We wear the mask that grins and lies.
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes."
She never appreciated her work unless it got a prize or good review or publication. It was never good enough just for its own worth.
Sylvia Plath was born on 27th October 1932, first child of Otto Plath, a professor of entomology and Amelia Schober, a teacher of business skills. Her father was more than twenty years older than her mother and died of complications of diabetes when Sylvia was thirteen. She blamed him for "leaving" her and feared (with good reason) betrayal by the men in her life always. She may have tried to commit suicide after his death. In her poem "Lady Lazarus" she writes:
"I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it-"
And later in the poem
"The first time it happened I was ten,
It was an accident."
Allowing for poetic licence (she was thirteen when her father died) ten, twenty and then thirty when she succeeded an appallingly fatalistic concept of life.
"And I am a smiling woman
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die."
By the time she had been at Smith College for nearly three years despite great academic success which she loved and the praise she needed, she was so depressed she tried and nearly succeeded in killing herself. She took a huge overdose of sleeping tablets which were much more available then than now.
Hospitalised several times she had electro-convulsive therapy without anaesthesia, insulin shock therapy and many different drug therapies. These are described in detail in The Bell Jar, included in which is a fellow patient who has had a lobotomy, a treatment popular at that time. She was under the care of a Dr Ruth Beuscher at one time and had some psychoanalysis with her. This doctor also befriended her and when Sylvia was very low in Devon years later she turned to Dr Beuscher for help. In a poem called "Tulips" written the year before she died she seems to regard hospital as a haven. She had just been in hospital (following a miscarriage she had to have an appendectomy) and she writes of the nurses:
"I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons."
All this seems to give her peace and she writes with annoyance about a bunch of red tulips she has been given (she doesn't say by whom).
"The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me...""A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck."
"I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.""The vivid tulips eat up my oxygen."
The oxygen in her world which she writes of in The Bell Jar is eaten up, ending with the suicide of a friend and fellow patient. A Dr. Nolan (woman psychiatrist probably based on Dr. Beuscher) insists to "Esther" the narrator of the story, that suicide is nobody else's fault; the person does it to herself. This will have to let Hughes off the hook a bit in my mind; if Plath thought no one else is ever to blame, why should I?)
Plath's final months were spent in a house in London where Yeats had once lived. She was thrilled with this, because coincidentally she and Hughes had visited Ireland some time before and visited Yeats' tower in the west of Ireland. She and her children Frieda and Nicholas lived on the top two floors and an Art historian Professor Trevor Thomas lived on the ground floor.
In the week before her death she sought and received psychiatric help on several days. Professor Thomas was so concerned about her the night before she died he suggested that she should seek further help at once. She did not, and early in the morning she put cups of milk beside her children's beds, went to the kitchen took another huge number of sleeping pills and turned on the gas oven, after taping the door so that the fumes could not get out.
In The Bell Jar after Esther left the asylum, "her mother said with her martyr's smile We'll take up where we left off, Esther. We'll act as if all this were a bad dream!"
"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream." Feeling this, how did Plath achieve what she did? In forty years how much progress have we made in psychiatry so that for her the world would have been less of a bad dream? Can we do any more now?
Senator Mary Henry, MD
