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Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath is described as a gifted writer, poet and verbal artist. Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in the middle class family in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. She published her first work when she was eight. Sylvia entered Smith College in 1950. By that time she already had a umber of publications. When she studied at Smith College, she wrote more than four hundred poems.
She spent some time in New York as a "guest editor" at Mademoiselle. When she returned home, she attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. After that, she received electroshock in a mental hospital. Plath used much of this experience for her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published in 1963 under the name Victoria Lucas. Plath graduated from Smith in 1955 and won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, where she met poet Ted Hughes. The story of their first meeting is now mythic in literary circles.
It is said that he stole her hair band, and she bit his cheek in return. They were married in 1956. In 1959, Plath and Hughes moved to England. Her first book of poetry The Colossus and Other Poems was published when she was twenty eight.
Later that year, Hughes left Plath for another woman. Plath spent that winter with their two children, Frieda and Nicholas, in a small London flat. She worked yearly in the mourning when children slept. This was a productive period for her.
She wrote almost a poem every day. On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath committed a suicide with gas at the age of 30. (Randall, 1989: 12). It is assumed that a cycle of poems evoke suicide. Sylvia seems to have raised the stakes of the literary venture for many of her readers, when she killed herself. Howard Moss, Plath's poetry editor at The New Yorker, once declared: "I don't think morbid fascination accounts for Plath's special position. The energy and violence of the late poems were acted out.
What their author threatened she performed, and her work gained an extra status of truth. The connection between art and life, so often merely rhetorical, became all too visible. " Sylvia Plath's association with death appeared from her confessional poetry, her novel The Bell Jar, and the facts of her life. But the most impressive thing came from the teenage readers who formed after her suicide. After Plath's marriage to poet Ted Hughes, her work was taken by scholars as evidence of a troubled soul oppressed by sexist times. Her poems published in Ariel are a real proof of her talent. Ted Hughes used to be Plath's literary executor.
He brought her collection of poetry, Ariel, to publication in 1965. Among the "scorching" poems in Ariel is Plath's most famous poem, "Daddy, " along with "Death and Co. " and "Lady Lazarus." For feminist scholars, Plath was a talented, brilliant woman done wrong by men and the times. Was she a victim of the 1950 s ideal of woman as housewife and mother, wedged into a domestic role inappropriate for someone with her skills? Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are usually mentioned in the same literary regard: both were confessional poets and committed suicides.
Sexton's poem "Sylvia's Death" discusses their mutual preoccupation with the subjects of death and desire. After her death, Plath achieved iconic status as a "madwoman" poet. For some cultural critics, she was the epitome of the silenced woman. (Lane & Stevens, 1978: 29 - 31). Hughes's writings on Plath foreclose the possibility of rethinking Plath's words; they insist that he alone can author her accurately. To write on Sylvia Plath is, according to Ted Hughes, to join "the wretched millions who have to find something to say in their papers, " it is to participate in the commercialistic "re-invention" of Hughes's own "private experiences and feelings. " Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die. Death is the theme in Sylvia Plath's poetry where its representations are explored from different angles. Numerous factors in her writing contribute to the readers understanding of her poetry. These include Plath's ability to communicate the theme of death by adopting either a subjective or an objective point of view. The use of a specific person perpetuates Plath's different representations of death by engaging the reader in either a personal or an impersonal way.
Poetic techniques such as images, language, rhyme and tone are able to depict death as either a positive or negative experience. Ted Hughes writes about Plath as if his readings are definition ally textual rather than biographical and others' readings are biographical rather than textual. Hughes's writings on Plath gives the possibility of rethinking Plath's words. These words are said to insist that he alone can author her accurately. (Randall, 1989: 12). Because Plath was known to use dictionaries and thesauri for writing, the rarity of some of the words she uses suggests that she was exploiting Symbols and the historical nature of language.
In a journal entry regarding prose, Plath uses a similar lexical combination: "Prose writing has become a phobia to me: my mind shuts and I clench. I can't, or won't, come clear with a plot." But the theme of closure characterizes Plath's statements about figures of speech and poetic language. Highly skeptical even of poetry, Plath formulated distinctions between poetry and prose. Hughes emphasizes Plath's active involvement in the creativity of language by irony and, at the same time, martial violence.
In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm compares the controversy that surrounds Sylvia Plath's name to a detective story: The Silent Woman is about the crimes that people commit against one another, like murder, burglary, brutal attacks. Regardless of the metaphors the author chooses a striking violence. Nor is it only the metaphors... real crimes have occurred. The question of whodunit has a real as well as a psychological dimension. Anna Fels wrote of The Silent Woman that there was a "real body." It is precisely the reality of this body that causes so much trouble for Plath studies.
Only in detective fiction does a dead body guarantee that a "true" explanation will follow. For those who knew Sylvia Plath personally, there was a real body. Sylvia Plath and her work arises from the way in which her name -- and her name as a sign for the battle over the female body that it represents -- reminds us that the body, especially the female body, is always somehow "real, " and can never escape its own corporeality. (Malcolm, 1987: 82 - 83). Evaluating poetry by the degree to which it is "performed" is a precarious position from which to defend it. But the demand for the truth of fact has resulted in arguments over the boundaries between fact and fiction in Plath's case. A statement that attempts to maintain a distinction between Plath's poetry and her life, such as Elizabeth Hardwicks in her work at least, Plath is never a nice person.
The problematic nature of biographical "truth" in Plath studies has resulted in an assumption that to study Sylvia Plath's writings is to be for or against her. If a writer is sympathetic to Plath, that writer is understood to be antagonistic to Ted Hughes, Plath's husband at the time of her death, her heir and executor. The use of disturbing imagery represents the horrific nature of death as a force, which destroys the mind and the life in a person. The setting is established in a room, which has connotations of an absence of emotions in a scientific and impersonal environment. The human corpses are described as black as burnt turkey as their organs and bones are removed. These images provide the reader with a greater significance.
Death extracts a persons life, mind and feelings from a human body. Hughes's writings produce the body that they say should not be produced. They create a mystery that will be solved by the author/ detective, Ted Hughes. The struggle over Plath is a struggle over the right to write the true story, rather than "fiction. " (Malcolm, 1987: 82 - 83). The hostility of the poems is disavowed even as it is insisted upon. Hughes publishes poems that are "too important to leave out, " although "there are quite a few things more important than giving the world great poems" and Plath herself had not included them in the collection.
The most astonishing thing about Plath will remain the fact that in two years, while she was almost fully occupied with children and house-keeping, she underwent a poetic development that has hardly any equal on record, for suddenness and completeness. The birth of her first child seemed to start the process. All at once she could compose at top speed, and with her full weight. Her second child brought things a giant step forward.
All the various voices of her gift came together. (Lane & Stevens, 1978: 29 - 31). Hughes has often dissociated himself from what he terms the Plath "Fantasia"- the myth that has grown up around her name and which he deplores. But this early comment is very much in keeping with many of the elements of the "Fantasia, " describes Plath as a mystical "poetess. " Plath's poetic gift may seem strange, but Hughes will solve this mystery: it was "the birth of her first child" that enabled Plath to develop poetically, and "her second child brought things a giant step forward. " The famous rage of the Ariel poems is not even mentioned in a comment that emphasizes childbirth. (Ries, 1977: 46 - 48). A year later, in 1966, Hughes published his "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems, " the first critical piece he wrote on Plath, which establishes the main themes of all of his readings. The "truth" in Hughes's writings on Plath tends to be the equation of Plath's work with herself: "in Plath, as with perhaps few poets ever, the nature, the poetic genius and the active self were the same. " Hughes sets up here his crucial theme, a tendentious reading of Sylvia Plath's life as a tragic narrative characterized by a struggle between destructive and nurturing impulses. The "whole" self for Hughes is the nurturing, maternal and fundamentally poetic self, though it is worth noting the passive construction: Plath does not create her own voice, but "becomes" it and "receives" it.
Hughes's conception of Plath's "last word" seems to be less interested in suicide than it is in combating the hostile effect of her echoing language, even as he ambivalently attempts to protect the words she left on the page. (Hughes, 1966. ) This is so pervasive an interpretation that at least one reader has explicitly asked what many others have implied: if Plath had not killed herself, would she "have the standing she has"? This reading of Plath is part and parcel of an ideology of poetry deeply rooted in the notion of the dangerously alienated artist. It seems problematic to assert that everything that came before the Ariel poems was merely a style, but that the last style was "true. " If Plath was consistently "shedding" styles, it is surely logical to conclude that, had she lived, she would have shed the Ariel voice eventually. The "true" self that Hughes's writings seek to create is the biological maternal self, which leads the article back into biography, in a long passage that may be the strangest in all of these strange moments: Sylvia Plath was a person of many masks... These were the visible faces of her lesser selves, her false or provisional selves... I never saw her show her real self to anybody - except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life.
Her real self had showed itself in her writing, just for a moment, three years earlier, and when I heard it -- the self I had married, after all, and lived with and knew well -- in that brief moment, three lines recited as she went out through a doorway, I knew that what I had always felt must happen had now begun to happen, that her real self, being the real poet. (Ries, 1977: 46 - 48). Bibliography: Hughes, T. Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems. New York: The Viking Press, 1966.
Lane, Gary, and Maria Stevens. Sylvia Plath: a bibliography. Metuchen, N. J. : Scarecrow P, 1978. Malcolm, J. Sylvia Plath: a biography.
NY: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Randall, J. Bitter fame: a life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Ries, Lawrence R.
Wolf masks: violence in contemporary poetry. Port Washington, N. Y. : Kennikat P, 1977.
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