Sylvia
Plath
was born in 1932, in Massachusetts, the daughter of German immigrants to the
US. Her father, Otto, was a professor
who specialised in bees. He became very unwell as Sylvia grew up, but did not
seek help, as he was convinced that he had cancer. He was eventually diagnosed
with diabetes, but his condition had not been helped by this delay in
treatment, which meant that one of his legs had to be amputated. Otto died shortly after Sylvia’s 8th
birthday. Sylvia’s mother,
Aurelia, worked 2 jobs in order to support Sylvia and her brother, Warren.
Sylvia was an excellent student, and did much to convey a
cheerful outward persona. She attended Gamaliel Bradford Senior High School,
and then won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950. Two years later she won a
$500 prize from “Mademoiselle” Magazine for her short story “Sunday at the
Mintons”. In June 1953, she was a
guest editor at “Mademoiselle”, but rather than elate her, this seemed to
depress her, especially when she learnt that she had not won a place on Frank
O’Connor’s creative writing course at Harvard. In August, she attempted
suicide, and was institutionalised at Maclean Hospital, where she received
electric shock treatments.
In 1955, Sylvia Plath was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to
attend Newnham College at Cambridge University. The following year, she met Ted Hughes at a party at St.
Botolph’s. Plath is said to have bitten Hughes on the cheek. The couple married 4 months later. When
she graduated in 1957, Plath was invited to return to Smith College as a
teacher of English. Although Smith College considered Plath to be a good
teacher, she felt depressed because she had not reached the very high standards
that she had she for herself. She
did not resume the post the following year. Instead, she took up a less
intensive clerical job at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
However, in late 1958, Plath resumed visiting her therapist from McLean, Ruth
Boucher. She also attended Robert Lowell’s evening class, which specialised in
confessional poetry. This course was to influence the composition of some of
Sylvia Plath’s most frank and dramatic poetry. Students are often asked to
ignore Plath’s life story in their assessment of her works, yet it is hard to
avoid doing this, since Plath herself imbued some much of her anguish into her
poems. Although the students on Lowell’s course generated powerful confessional
work, it did not seem to provide any catharsis for them. Anne Sexton, another
well-regarded poet who attended the course, also later committed suicide.
On learning that she was pregnant, Sylvia and Ted moved back
to the UK. In February 1960,
whilst she was pregnant, Sylvia signed a contract with William Heinemann Ltd to
publish “The
Colossus”, which was published in October of the same year. Sylvia gave
birth to Frieda Rebecca. The following February, however, Sylvia suffered a
miscarriage. The couple moved to Devon, where Sylvia felt more isolated than
ever, as the couple’s relationship was not going well. Despite this, Sylvia
gave birth to a 2nd child, Nicholas Farrar, in January 1962. Later
in the year, Sylvia discovered that Ted had been having an affair with Assia
Wevill, the wife of Canadian poet David Wevill. Sylvia and Ted separated in
September. It is thought that Sylvia wrote a great many of the “Ariel”
poems that October. In December, Sylvia and the children moved into 23 Fitzroy
Road, a house previously inhabited by W.B. Yeats. “The Bell
Jar”, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel about a young woman being
institutionalised during the trial of the Rosenbergs, was published under the
pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” in January 1963. Short of money, and feeling ill,
Sylvia Plath committed suicide the following month, by asphyxiating herself in
the gas oven.
Although Sylvia Plath had evidently suffered a great deal of
mental anguish before she met Ted Hughes, some chose to blame him for her
death. The publication of “Ariel” posthumously in 1965, with its starkly honest
and dramatic poems, sparked a great deal of interest into the woman who had
written them. Some readers chose to blame Ted Hughes for her suicide, and there
were attempts to excise the name of “Hughes” from Sylvia Plath’s gravestone.
Ted Hughes became Sylvia’s executor upon her death, and he was criticised for
‘controlling’ her work, and denigrated for destroying the volume of her journal
that dealt with Sylvia’s relationship with him. However, it is also believed
that Sylvia Plath destroyed some of her own work in 1962. Tragically, Assia
Wevill killed herself and her daughter with Ted Hughes, Shura, in a manner
similar to that which Sylvia Plath had used. It appears that she was unable to
cope with the complex emotions aroused by Sylvia’s earlier suicide.
Several more volumes of Plath’s poems were published
posthumously: “Crossing
the Water” 1971, “Winter
Trees” (1972), and “The
Collected Poems” were published in 1981, which won the Pulitzer Prize. “Johnny
Panic and the Bible of Dreams”, a collection of short stories, was
published in 1977. Some of her work has been released as children’s books: “The
Red Book” (1976), “The
It-Doesn’t-Matter-Suit” (1996), “Collected
Children’s Stories” (2001), and “Mrs.
Cherry’s Kitchen” (2001).
Sylvia Plath’s college thesis, “The Magic Mirror”, was also published in
1989. In 1975, Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother, published her “Letters
Home”. In 1982, Ted Hughes was again criticised when he published an edited
volume of “The
Journals of Sylvia Plath”, however he said that they were edited to spare
the children more anguish. In 1998, suffering from liver cancer, Ted Hughes
published “Birthday
Letters”, a volume of verse written about his relationship with Sylvia,
with cover artwork by their daughter Frieda. Ted Hughes passed away in October
of the same year, having been the UK’s Poet Laureate for 14 years. In 2000, “The
Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, edited by Karen V. Kukil, were
released.
Modern American Poetry – a
1962 Sylvia Plath interview with Peter Orr: “think my poems immediately come
out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot
sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except
a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to
control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being
tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these
experiences with an informed and an intelligent mini I think that personal
experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box
and mirror looking, narcissistic experience.”
Ted,
Sylvia and me – Al Alvarez, who commissioned poems by Sylvia Plath and Ted
Hughes in “The Observer”, writes about the Sylvia he knew
Dying
for melodrama: why does Sylvia Plath still seduce the adolscent psyche? –
an article by Alissa Quart
Sylvia Plath and the difficulties of literary
production – Kevin Patrick Mahoney’s
essay
Sylvia
Plath’s transformations of modernist paintings – Sherry Lutz Zivley’s essay
Trapped
in language: aspects of ambiguity and intertextuality in selected poetry and
prose by Sylvia Plath – an essay by Andrea Gerbig and Anja Muller-Wood
Ted
Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath – Sarah Churchwell’s essay
Being
and ‘truth’: Tar Baby’s signifying on Sylvia Plath’s bee poems – Malin
Walther Pereira’s essay
Plath,
domesticity and the art of advertising – Marsha Bryant’s essay
The
doxies of daughterhood: Plath, Cixous, and the father – Marilyn Manners’
essay
Sylvia Plath: A
Search for Self – Tasha Whitton’s essay
The
following
essays are not free and are not online, but you may be able to find them in
your local university library:
Peel,
Robin "The Ideological Apprenticeship of Sylvia Plath"
Journal of Modern Literature - Volume 27, Number 4, Summer 2004, pp. 59-72
Indiana University Press
Narbeshuber,
Lisa "The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath's Poetry"
Canadian Review of American Studies - Volume 34, Number 2, 2004, pp. 185-203
University of Toronto
Press
Pollak, Vivian R. "Moore,
Plath, Hughes and "The Literary Life""
American Literary History - Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2005, pp. 95-117
Oxford University Press
Clark,
Heather L. "Tracking the Thought-Fox: Sylvia Plath's Revision of Ted
Hughes"
Journal of Modern Literature - Volume 28, Number 2, Winter 2005, pp. 100-112
Indiana University Press
Peel,
Robin "The Bell Jar Manuscripts, Two January 1962 Poems, "Elm,"
and Ariel"
Journal of Modern Literature - Volume 23, Number 3/4, Summer 2000, pp. 441-454
Indiana University Press
Gordon,
John 1945- "Being Sylvia Being Ted Being Dylan: Plath's "The Snowman
on the Moor""
Journal of Modern Literature - Volume 27, Number 1/2, Fall 2003, pp. 188-192
Indiana University Press
DeShong,
Scott "Sylvia Plath, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Aesthetics of Pathos"
Postmodern Culture - Volume 8, Number 3, May 1998,
The Johns Hopkins
University Press
Breslin,
Paul "Demythologizing Sylvia Plath"
Modernism/modernity - Volume 8, Number 4, November 2001, pp. 675-679
The Johns Hopkins
University Press
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