After Her Last Breath

Many believed Sylvia Plath to be a victim of her own mind, but I believe her mind to be a victim of an unjust society.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in the year 1932, American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath was, and continues to be regarded as “Ted Hughes’s poet wife” or “the girl that placed her head in a gas oven.” In fact, the core reason that had prompted the 30-year-old woman to die by suicide on the 11th of February 1963 was painfully obvious to Plath’s psychiatrist: clinical depressive disorder. However, the condemning remarks of biographers, acquaintances, and readers of Plath’s works believe the responsibility of her rather sudden and enigmatic death comes from a Freudian approach: triggered by her tyrannical father figure, the demands of her mother to be a literary prodigy, or the distraught she felt at her split-up with her husband Ted Hughes as a result of his affair with another woman. The renowned French absurdist philosopher Albert Camus claims ‘suicide is the only serious philosophical question.’ Perhaps this is why Plath’s death does not cease to haunt and provoke our interest, generations after her suicide. Conversely, it is problematic for Sylvia Plath to be only recognized for her suicide for we cannot forget the way she lived, that is, through her writing, the escape she created for herself in a world in which she felt suffocated.

Plath needed to write to feel sane, but her insanity also drove her to write. In an era where one’s gender at birth dictated their future and the gender equality in freedom of expression had not been normalized, Sylvia Plath professed her contempt toward society through sentences and stanzas. She won various awards for her work and poetry, many of which were published in local newspapers. The solace she found in writing stayed with Plath from a young age, after the death of her oppressive father, Otto Plath. Additionally, this event inspired her future poems such as Daddy, where she boldly alludes to her father being a Nazi soldier: "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-- / Not God but a swastika" (Plath, lines 41-47) and in contrast, equates herself to a Jewish prisoner. Although controversial to some, good writing makes us think. Plath does not fail to remind us that historical calamities like these are ultimately metaphors for the terrible human psyche by personalising the century's socio-political tragedies.

Plath’s passion for the pen progresses through the years as she observes her fellow classmates nonchalantly drop out from high school one by one to become somebody’s wife. She writes in her journal, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath:

“…will I be a secretary – a self-rationalizing, uninspired housewife, secretly jealous of my husband’s ability to grow intellectually & professionally while I am impeded – will I submerge my embarrassing desires & aspirations, refuse to face myself, and go either mad or become neurotic?” (Plath, 151)

Here we discover an apprehensive and nihilistic writer who is struggling not only to understand her lack of freedom in the world, but to also identify and disclose her feminism within it. In fact, Plath frequently wrote about her place in civilization as a woman, challenging and rebelling against the social and cultural norms that were laid out for her to follow and succumb to. Her poem Mushrooms, written in 1959, has a strong protest theme against male oppression. It foreshadows female insurrection and urges women to come together in order to develop a unified voice against the belief and values of a patriarchal society. Nudgers and shovers, / In spite of ourselves. / Our kind multiplies (Plath, lines 28-30). The poem goes on to chastise women for she believes they should demand and defend their rights more vigorously and break out from their conventional status as housewives.

Another powerful work of Plath’s includes The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel about the life of Esther Greenwood who struggles with her dream of becoming a poet as her time in New York, working for a prestigious magazine, becomes unfulfilling. The storyline closely resembles Plath's adolescent years, when she too, travelled to New York for an internship at Mademoiselle magazine, the circumstances of which precipitated a downward spiral that concluded in her first attempt to take her own life. Talking openly about mental illness and insanity has long been a taboo subject, especially in the 1960s, when it was still regular practice to put individuals affected by mental illness into electroconvulsive treatment, which Plath herself underwent. The title of The Bell Jar symbolizes the madness of being trapped in her own mind and in society at large, further manifesting the young writer’s predominant role in confessional literature; but most importantly, her novel gives teenage girls, being previously belittled for centuries, a voice as well as the hope that recovery is attainable.

Unfortunately, it was only after her death that Plath's writings were popularized and taught in educational institutions, and she remains an icon today of not only confessional literature but also the second wave feminist movement.

While there is no remedy for the human condition, the raw emotion and absolute sincerity that can be found in Sylvia Plath’s work continue to inspire, educate, and move the hearts and minds of countless individuals living in generations after her. Language is made of time for it exists eternally in time, and the prose of a notable writer is timeless. With that being said, I deem it is evident that Sylvia Plath should not be defined by her death, for the echo of her voice nonetheless still lingers with us within the pages of her literature even after she takes her last breath.