There has been a link with creativity and madness since the beginning of time. The art of dance was combined with insanity when the Maenades began their worship of Dionysus, working themselves into a mad fervor, unable to control themselves. Such a connection is a thread that has remained unbroken since the days of the ancient Greeks and their ancestors. Michelangelo Buonarrotti and Van Gogh were both sufferers of mental instability which led to exceptional amounts of depression and in Vincent Van Gogh’s case, suicide. Suicide is a common reoccurrence in the life of creative people, but most prominently in literary artists. The long list of purposeful self inflicted deaths by writers and poets is staggering, but perhaps the most sensational suicide by a writer to date has been that of Sylvia Plath. What makes her death so much more staggering is that it was not a shocking event, at least in the context of her works. While other artists spoke of their “demons” in an unwanted way, speaking only to exorcise the problems that laid heavy on their sickened minds Sylvia Plath relished in her hopelessness.
Plath was a star amongst many other beings that faded past her talent and beauty, but knowing she was popular and gifted was not enough to satisfy her want of glory and recognition. Plath used her mental instability as a crutch, relying upon her breakdowns and suicide attempts constantly for inspiration. After the meager wave that “The Colossus” made after it was originally published, again Plath returned to her personal breakdowns. She became obsessed with her mental disorders and became absorbed in her own traumatic past, writing of her pains and paranoia as Perloff states in Contemporary Literary Criticism, “the attempt to heal the fracture between inner self and false-self system so that a real and viable identity can come into existence.” Plath wrote The Bell Jar in such a way, trying to rid herself of the shy and ‘good’ image she had taught herself to fit into since childhood, and to unveil the ‘real’ Sylvia- the dirty and sexual being she thought herself to be. Esther Greenwood , main character of the novel, desperately attempts to shed her outward cast of ‘niceness’ while still maintaining her inner being-shown so clearly through the novel’s narration, that which Plath wanted to show to the world, the gritty, caustic and self serving woman.
What made her try to squeeze and crush her body and mind into a mould of a “good” person and try to be a stereotypical woman of the nineteen fifties and early sixties stemmed from a childhood filled with sadness and morbidity. Otto and Aurelia Plath do not seem to have been the most apt parents, in truth they seemed to be more focused on their careers and themselves, particularly Aurelia Plath after the death of her husband-the world renowned bee authority and distruster of life insurance. Mrs. Plath decided to fall back on her shorthand abilities and taught at Boston University in attempt to amend the loss of funds because of her husband’s death, while her daughter began to feel the aftershocks of the most terrific disaster to occur in her life. The crushing blow of Otto’s death left an impression on Sylvia that in many ways corrupted both her views of family and men. In an essay published by “The Handbook of Creativity” David Henry Feldman rationalizes that creative beings in a family where there has been parental loss will force the child to make creative outlets and to also seek refuge from the traumatic experiences in numerous ways. For Sylvia Plath her outlet of writing provided the small opening for her real essence to seep out from her plastered visage of happiness and bliss-Plath inner depressed child, inner angry and spite filled daughter. There was little besides her poetry and texts that could ever soothe her of her traumatic past, except Plath’s own deathwish.
“The Bell Jar” and the posthumously published “Ariel” were overflowing with references to death, depression and suicidal thoughts. However, unlike the more subdued collection, “Colossus”, the first and, eventually, last novel Plath wrote was acclaimed, and “Ariel’s” poems have been viewed as her best poetry. “Her poems have the hard focused power of surgical laser beams, once read they’re never forgotten, we’re scarred” wrote Wilfrid Sheed in “The Suicide’s Home Companion”. The completion of the poems was at hand when Plath committed the final act of her triune suicide attempts. The literary scars that so many receive when they read Plath’s final installment of poetry is a deliberate act on the macabre poetess’ part. She knew that her words were filled with a power people had not seen before her, forceful and revealing in a way that was uncommon. She had the order for which the poems were supposed to be published, the order for which the reader of the poetry was to receive their lashes, complete at the times of her death.
Plath knew her work was great, she knew her work had a place in society; and the fact that it was mainly about death and the process of dying showed her risk taking skills. She reveled in her world of doom, as Alvarez phrases her feelings “The more she wrote about death the more fertile her imaginative world became.” The more her imagination consumed her the more her obsession with dying grabbed a hold yet again of Plath’s mind, the process of writing about death was not enough to quench Plath’s inquiries into suicide-she had to experience it. Again, it could not have been a surprise when the news broke that Plath gassed herself in her London flat’s kitchen. Her friends noticed that she was stimulated by risk, and indeed the strength of the work in her final days does show her bursting with energy.
She was enveloped in her own world, pushing away other beings that would stand in her way of reaching her ultimate goal of self inflicted death, her ultimate triumph, her nirvana. The children whom she was entrusted with meant nothing, nor anymore did the praise of her work. She would be praised for her creativity, she would be unraveled like Cleopatra before Caesar to the world in her true form, and she could not wait for the event to occur; “Without self pity… she plunges forward to the “stony certainty”, “the stasis of death.” wrote Richard Locke on her final creative period.
“The moral assumptions behind Sylvia Plath's poetry condemned her to death” writes Joyce Carol Oates, and in truth it was her own assumptions that her twisted and sickened mind was in a state to rationalize the outcome of her attempt to kill herself would be anything but startling lead her to her emotionally outraged poetry. She filled lines with her childhood’s pain, of her hatred for her mother, and of herself, as well as the loathing of her estranged spouse Ted Hughes. All these pangs of cruelty done to this human cannot ever come to a point of catharsis; it will keep growing in front of the creator of the work like a terrible birthmark.
Her utopia was a twisted and gnarled garden of glamour and horrid images. It was to bring her final comfort from the painful thorns that jabbed at her skin and cut her so deeply. She wanted her death to happen and would keep attempting to until her body was laid in a coffin. She was lucky in the adage that “the third time’s the charm”. After suicide attempt mirroring Esther Greenwood’s attempt in “The Bell Jar”, complete with a sleeping pill induced disappearance, and a car crash, Plath manages to succeed in her attempts, “ Dying/ Is an art, like everything else,/ I do it exceptionally well.” wrote Plath herself in the poem “Lady Lazarus”. Her death was a theatrical production, she staged it perfectly. She had achieved her want to be “number one”. With her death, Sylvia Plath even outshone her poet Laureate husband, Ted Hughes; an accomplishment that was worth every moment of the gas seeping into her mind and shutting down her senses.
Her obsessions were what we as society were and are afraid of. Death and dying is fearfully viewed and held up as a strange occurrence. Plath enjoyed dying immensely and to her it was not strange, it was a normal occurrence that happened in her life since she was a small child of eight. She saw that, ultimately, “that the price we pay for life is death” ( Scholes, New York Times). Her living was only going, as she viewed the situation, to become more impacted with death and that which would hurt her more than the suicide; her death was an escape to happiness’ her self-destructiveness a tool from which she had all her ‘important’ work channeled through. Sylvia Plath needed to die; otherwise, the same reoccurring themes of her work would have become redundant to her supporters. Her suicide remains a fresh image in the mind of her readers, she scarred them with a finality that will not heal; much like the wounds she suffered throughout her short and depressing life never healed over for Plath, there was no other way than death. Living was not an option.
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