"Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call." —From Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath: Bio of The Bell Jar

On a cold February morning in 1963, Sylvia Plath accomplished what she had tried, romanticized and written about so many times—her own suicide.  Plath, sick with the flu, abandoned by her husband and broke, left out a plate of bread and glasses of milk for her two sleeping children in the bedroom, sealed off the cracks to their door, then rested her head in the oven and gassed herself to death.
 
 

November Graveyard By Sylvia Plath The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last year's leaves, won't mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. No dead men's cries Flower forget-me-nots between the stones Paving this grave ground. Here's honest rot To unpick the heart, pare bone Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints' tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun. At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air

Sylvia Plath's grave in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, England

In death, Lady Lazarus rose from the ashes of a tormented existence to gain the notoriety she had so desperately sought in life.  Thirty-eight years later, Plath's words endure, waiting to be unearthed, resurrected and devoured by new generations of hungry cult-worshipers that continue to pay homage to the tragic voice of passionate despair.  In our thirst for human anguish we seek to resurrect Sylvia Plath and place her upon a pedestal of martyrdom.  We live vicariously through the melodrama of her suffering, aestheticizing her death which we wholly sympathize and identify with, and perhaps even envy as well.

Sylvia's poetry epitomized death, tragedy and suffering.  As a writer who dwells on the same morbid themes, I know that while my writing is not autobiographical in nature, it contains stillborn creations and the skeletons of my own experiences and emotions.  Surely this must have been true for Sylvia, as well.  To say otherwise belittles her ability as a creator of divine verse, entwining her own feelings into a fictional world that mirrored her own.  THE BELL JAR (1960) is obviously autobiographical, divulging her ordeals in New York in the summer of 1952 where she worked as guest editor at Mademoiselle Magazine.  It profiles her slow emotional collapse and failed suicide attempt, all loosely covered in her fiction.  Plath dramaticized her own death in her works, perhaps as a way to exorcize her own demons, or perhaps because of her romantic fascination with it.
 
 

Mad Girl's Love Song By Sylvia Plath "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sylvia's graduation photo

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

I was first introduced to Sylvia Plath's work in my twenties, when an admirer told me my poetry reminded her of Plath.  I had vaguely heard of her then, but until that point hadn't read any of her works.  It was then that I read several books of her poetry and bought THE BELL JAR which I quickly consumed.  As one who suffers from terrible depression and tends to dwell on the dark aspects of my own life in writing, I felt an affinity with Plath's poetry that touched me on a deep, personal level.

Plath's talents manifested in her ability to flay open her flesh and expose the anguish of her soul, to portray the depths of her own depression and madness that needled beneath the exterior facade and touched the heart on such a profound level.  For people who suffer from severe depression, her words are like an echo from the subconscious that haunts the soul.  Plath split her emotions and experiences into various personas, outward reflections of her inner strife, digging deep inside to unearth the monsters that plagued her—the death of her father; her own self-defeating perfectionism that would not allow her to accept her failures; her relationship with her husband, Ted Hughs, and his adulterous affair and rejection; her inability to control the world around her; and her physical and mental illness.

Perhaps Plath's self-loathing and death wish stemmed from her overachieving personality—she was already a poet at the tender age of five. An incredibly gifted writer, her intelligence and sensitivity compelled her to perfection and obsessive bouts of prolific creativity.  Often she took on more than she could handle, and her failures devastated her.  She simply couldn't live up to her own expectations of herself, and for this, she punished herself and fell into despair.  In her poem, "Ariel," she talks about herself and her feelings of suicide.
 
 

"Black sweet blood mouthfuls, Shadows. Something else Hauls me through air— Thighs, hair; Flakes from my heels. White Godiva, I unpeel— Dead hands, dead stringencies. And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas. The child's cry

Sylvia Plath

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning."

—From Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Plath talked about the demon within her that would not allow her to succeed, would not allow her to be human and fail.  The murderous self with the self-defeating nature who constantly scolded her, and called her stupid and weak.  It was this destructive self she tried again and again to face, and to crush under her feet.

"I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible.  It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect.  Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily.  If I get through this year, kicking my demon down when it comes up, realizing I'll be tired after a day's work, and tired after correcting papers, and it's natural tiredness, not something to be ranted about in horror, I'll be able, piece by piece, to face the field of life, instead of running from it the minute it hurts."

—From The Journals of Sylvia Plath

After her return from New York, Plath began a downward spiral into depression where she developed insomnia and lost her ability to concentrate.  Life became so intolerable at this point that Plath admitted to her mother that she wanted to die, following an incident in which her mother found self-inflicted scars on her legs.

"I worked all during the hectic month of June in the plushy air-conditioned offices of Mademoiselle Magazine, helping set up the August issue.  I came home exhausted, fully prepared to begin my two courses at Harvard Summer School, for which I'd been offered a partial scholarship.  Then things started to happen. I'd gradually come to realize that I'd completely wasted my Junior year at Smith. . .

. . . I began to frequent the offices and couches of the local psychiatrists, who were all running back and for on summer vacations.  I became unable to sleep.  I became immune to increased doses of sleeping pills.  I underwent a rather brief and traumatic experience of badly given shock treatments on an outpatient basis.  Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide."

—From Letters Home, Sylvia Plath
 
 

Cover of The Bell Jar

On August 24, 1953, Plath made her first known suicide attempt by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills and hiding in a crawlspace beneath her porch.  She left a note saying she had gone for a walk.  Much to her family's distress, it took two days until she was discovered, covered in her own vomit and semi-comatose.  For the next several months, she was institutionalized at Maclean Hospital where she underwent shock therapy, about which she wrote: "A time of darkness, despair, disillusion—so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be—symbolic death, and numb shock—then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration." —From The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Even here we hear the voice of Lady Lazarus, one who has already died and is about to be reborn.  Depression is like a black hole of non-emotion and emptiness, feeling what we assume death would feel like if we could experience it.  To Plath, she was already dead.  She tried hard to resurrect herself by starting a new life—the seeds of THE BELL JAR were sown at this time and the deeper self emerged to spill her blood upon the page.
 
 

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughs

Plath's resurrection began with her move to England, where she won a scholarship to Cambridge.  There she met Ted Hughs, an aspiring poet whom she admired.  Immediately their relationship was one of both passion and pain. ". . .that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. . .

—From The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Still, the fairytale romance that Plath had wanted fell apart and her life was again wrought by bouts of depression, feelings of insecurity, gloom and dissatisfaction.

"Away from sodden mud and cutting winds of gray Cambridge, away from the freezing white frosts of a cold gray London, where the sun hung in the white mists like a bloody egg yolk.  Away from the rain and wet feet of Paris, with colored lights wavering in the gutters running with water, and the Seine flowed gray and sluggish by the quais and Notre Dame lifted two towers to a lowering, thick, curded gray sky."

—From The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Plath's hopes of starting a new life were then devastated by her husband's betrayal and affair.  During this time, she reopened old wounds from her past—the death of her father, Otto, whom Hughs reminded her of.  Plath, only eight at the time of his death, responded to the news by declaring, "I'll never speak to God again."  It was clear that the adult Plath had unfinished business with her dead father, which may be evidenced in her poem "Daddy."

A father's love and acceptance is important to the growing ego of a young girl.  Plath described her father as a cold, dark, intimidating man she could not talk to.  Otto Plath died before Sylvia could form the loving father-daughter relationship she so desperately longed for, leaving her with feelings of abandonment.  Even after his death she lived in his shadow.  Was she afraid of failure and his disappointment?  Is that why Plath pushed herself so hard, to gain his approval, even in his death?

At the end of the poem, her father became symbolic of the men in her life, specifically Ted Hughs, who she was married to for seven years, and who during the time she was writing "Daddy" was having an affair.  Plath used the vampire as a metaphor of the dead (her father) stealing the life from the living (herself), and as a monster (Ted Hughs) who is figuratively draining her life.  In the end she symbolically killed them both with a stake through the heart, exorcizing herself of the pain and guilt from her father's death that had tormented her for years, and dealing with the anger and rejection she felt because of her husband's betrayal and abandonment.  To her these emotions of bitterness and resentment were intertwined.

"If I've killed one man, I've killed two–
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through."

—From "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath

From there Plath began her final descent into the blackness of depression that consumed her.  It was the bell jar all over again, in which she was under the distorted lens and "the world itself is the bad dream."  She was Lady Lazarus laying her weary head down for the final rest.  Yet her poetry resurrected itself in her stead, the romanticized image of her tragic life and fateful death catapulting her into instant fame.  Like many artisans and writers before her (Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti) she lived and died tragically, and her final poem was her own beautiful death.  And, like Lady Lazarus, she has become reborn and immortalized by the words she put to page.
 
 

Edge
(Her Last Complete Poem)
By Sylvia Plath

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
 
 

Sources:
-The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath;Harper & Row;  © 1981.
-Ariel by Sylvia Plath; Harper & Row; © 1966.
-Letters Home : Correspondence, 1950-1963 by Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Schober Plath.  ©1975.
-The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath; Karen V. Kukil (Editor); Anchor Books. © 2000
-The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath; Faber & Faber; © 1966.
 

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