Parallelism In The Life And Works Of Sylvia Plath Essay, Research Paper

Parallelism in the Life and Works of Sylvia Plath To write about an artist s life is to write about his or her art. This is the inescapable truth of literature which one must confront each time he examines either aspect. When the artist in question is primarily a poet, the relationship between life and art becomes even more intense and less patient of disengagement. Of course, when the poet is Sylvia Plath, a confessional poet who was consciously dedicated to fusing biography with poetry to create an enduring legend, this relationship can no longer be split apart or seriously challenged (Bundtzen 3). Under the guise of art and fiction, Sylvia told us the story of her life. She invited her readers into her mind and allowed them to view the painfully and beautifully twisted world of a disturbed personality (Holbrook 239). She whispered her inner most thoughts and dreams into their ears. But their ears were deaf to her sorrow and refused to listen to her pain. So, on February 11, 1963, she did what she had promised (Bassnett 22). In her London flat, while her children were asleep, Sylvia Plath gassed herself (22). Her last poem, Edge, written on February 5, opens with the now famous lines The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment (24). This was not Sylvia s first attempt, merely her first success (McClanahan 164). During the summer following her junior year at Smith College, having returned from a month-long stay in New York City where she had been a student guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine, Plath swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills in an attempt to end her life (Steiner 22). She later described this experience and the mental breakdown that accompanied it, in her nearly- autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. First published in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, The Bell Jar provides a detailed account of the attempted suicide and psychiatric treatment of Esther Greenwood, a sensitive young writer, remarkably like Plath herself (McClanahan 164). The general outline of the novel is, in fact, a genuine succession of events that actually took place in 1953 (Lehrer 43). It can be divided into three parts. The first nine chapters set the scene, introduce the major characters, and indicate the basic conflicts through flashbacks into Esther s past. Once the bell jar, the symbol for Esther s growing isolation and disintegration, is mentioned, the narrative shifts to the present, and the second part begins. Chapters 10 to 13 relate Esther s return home, her frustration upon hearing that she had been rejected for a writing course at Harvard, her serious depression, and the subsequent suicide attempt. The last section, Chapters 14 to 20, deals exclusively with the heroine s recovery and rehabilitation, and concludes with Esther s final interview with a board of doctors who will pronounce her fit to return to college. Many details are also true to life: her accounts of the superficial, unrealistic atmosphere of the New York fashion magazine world, the poisoning of the whole staff at a stylish Gala dinner, the frustrating interview with the editor-in-chief, Miss Cyrile Abels, whom Plath names Jay Cee, and Plath s relationship with her medical-student fianc Dick Norton, who is called Buddy Willard in the novel (Bundtzen 112). Also the second part of The Bell Jar is quite accurate, including Esther s insomnia, her fruitless sessions with Dr. Gordan, the psychiatrist her mother had engaged, the shock treatments, her consequential plans to end her life, and last but not least the attempt itself. In the third part, Plath did not even bother to change the names of the two asylums where she had been treated, the psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General Hospital, where association with other patients severely disturbed her, and the private clinic McLean in Belmont, Massachusetts, which was financed by Philomena Guinea, Esther s wealthy benefactress (114).

In addition to this traumatic period in Plath s life, she, in her poetry, tended to dwell upon the death of her father, when she was eight (McClanahan 164). The feelings of abandonment she experienced at this early age, seemed to stimulate much of the violent father-figure imagery that can be found in Plath s first book of poetry The Colossus and in Ariel, which was published posthumously (164). The second stanza from the most widely analyzed of Plath s poems, Daddy, reads as follows: Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back, to you. I thought even the bones would do (166). As Plath describes Daddy, it is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God (Holbrook 292). Like nearly all of her poetry, Daddy, is presented in a confessional tone, as truth and as autobiography. Plath is acutely aware of her supposed Electra complex, both in her poems and in The Bell Jar – of suicide being an act of love and longing for a union with a dead father who has, in her imagination at least, become a god, a colossus. Plath would have been a good poet even if she had not committed suicide, but not exactly the poet she has since become. Our knowledge of her suicide comments on the poetry as we read it. The image of the poet that rises out of the verse wears the aspect of her fate. Plath s art was her life, and her life was her art. She was willing to die in order to complete the masterpiece. By the time she was feverishly writing her Ariel poems that last winter, Sylvia felt she had finally attained what she had been searching for her entire life – her true poetic voice (McClanahan 164). Only, with the birth of her true poetic self, came the death of its creator. What had brought forth a tremendous outburst of beautifully accomplished verse was tragically linked with the poet s own demise. Perfection in art demanded perfection in life, which Plath understood as fully and truly accomplished in death only. Perhaps, she best summed-up this knowledge in the famous first line of her Lady Lazarus, when she stated simply, very simply, Dying is an art (Lane 42). Works ConsultedAmes, Lois. Biographical Note. The Bell Jar. By Sylvia Plath. New York: Bantam, 1971. 203-216.Bassnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath. London: Macmillan, 1987.Bundtzen, Lynda K. Plath s Incarnations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.Holbrook, David. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. London: Athlone Press, 1976.Lane, Gary. Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.Lehrer, Sylvia. The Dialectics of Art and Life: A Portrait of Sylvia Plath as Woman and Poet. Salzburg, Austria: University of Salzburg Press, 1985. McClanahan, Thomas. Plath, Sylvia. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1992.Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Bantam, 1971.Steiner, Nancy Hunter. A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.Wagner, Linda W., ed. Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge, 1988.

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