sylvia plath - current · pdf filesylvia plath in the context of times and cultures: a...

Sylvia Plath in the Context of Times and Cultures: A Critical Analysis

Dr. Pradeep Kumar Debata H.O.D in English

Humanities Kalinga Polytechnic

KIIT University Bhubaneswar

Odisha-751024.

Sylvia Plath occupies an icon- generative presence in American literary imagination. She is one of the few American poets whose poems span across cultures. Her works continue to inspire, fascinate and resonate with readers across borders and generations even too, after death. She was born and brought up in America. She had an innate fascination for things when she was growing up in the east of America; but as she matured she gave up rigid provincialism and narrow human bias. Her poems became as expansive as her own country and embraced in their multiplicity not only her anxieties and concerns, but also the cultural profile of the age in which she was living. The poetic vision in a way was dictated by her unsettling drifting mind which knew no boundaries.

Plath was the only American writer ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. Her struggles with mental illness, her tumultuous marriage to British poet Ted Hughes and the sorrowful details of her death have become as much a major part of her cultural legacy as her poetic creations. Plath speaks to people from across the social and cultural spectrum, and her writings have the enduring appeal and charm to draw the attention of readers cutting across class, gender and nationality. Plath’s literary creation includes her novel and poems, to create a pattern of perfection to overcome the psychic process and concerns of the characters. Her writings reveal the violence in the references to the Nazis, the Concentration Camps, to Auschwitz and the Dachau. Plath has drawn the boundaries between sickness and health, life and death, love and war: “I am interested in the battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on and I think as I age I am becoming more and more historical”. Thus Plath had said to Peter Orr in an interview on October 30, 1962 just a couple of months before her death.

The pleasures and joys of growing up have become a theme of her early poems. But, we find that her past suffused with the memories with her demised father. There is a marked autobiographical twist to everything she writes – her poems are tied in the smithy of her soul. The demands and echoes of the history and culture of her times echo in her poems as she moved across the countries like America and England. When Plath came to England, her life took a different turn. She not only came in contact with the English poet Ted Hughes, but also stared to write keeping in mind the ‘burden of the past’ which came as the inheritance with her marriage to Ted Hughes. Perhaps, any other minor poet would have lost the poetics of craftsmanship and would have been consumed by the anxiety of influences which comes with the adaptation and practice of a new culture. Sylvia Plath survived because she was grounded to not just one culture or country. She made common cause of the agonies and

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strife of the human heart and people cutting across cultures which were drawn into the ambit of her poems. And her poems echoed the plight of the people in Hiroshima, Auschwitz and Dachau even as she juxtaposed her own problems i.e. her troubled life with Ted Hughes. In due course, she left Ted Hughes to live on her own. But she remained attached to the English literary culture, and she struggled a lot to compensate and contain with the beatitude offered to her in the form of poetry.

Plath won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for Collected Poems. She had committed suicide at an early impressionable age when her literary career was just blooming up with all its promises and possibilities. In the words of Anne Stevenson she may be called as, “a martyr mainly to the recurrent psychodrama that staged itself within The Bell Jar of her tragically wounded personality”, a self-destructive woman who expresses herself as:

“Dying Is an art, like everything else? I do it exceptionally we.” (Plath 244, Lady Lazarus)

It is very much viewed that Plath’s creation never comes back together as completely whole where we find the wounds are left open, scars unpainted, smiles unnoticed etc. Some aspects of Plath’s life are always missing from these attempts. Plath was never a woman completely consumed by one thought, whether it is death, depression, her demised father, Ted Hughes, or her poetry. But, she was with many roles such as a wife, a mother, a daughter, a poet, an American, and a British. Plath’s life is the domestic collision with the artistic creation, where no emotion left unexplored. It must be anecdotal that Plath was fed by life, with its trials and tribulations, ups and downs, and joys and tears etc. The voice of Ariel is one that knows all sides of the spectrum, having journeyed to and through hell to know the experience on the other side. In her own journal, Plath very clearly states her view that “My health is making stories, poems, and novels, of experience: that is why, or, rather, that is why it is good, that I have suffered & been to hell, although not to all hells. I cannot live for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux.” (Journals 286).

Sylvia Plath was a gifted poet. She embodies a deep sense of sadness what many researches, writers, and critics have tried their level best to paint a complete life of Plath. But to appreciate, the most accurate reading of her life and emotions one has to go back to her poetry, the short stories, the novel, where Sylvia really lives and everything else is just a version of the truth, or the enigma that was Sylvia Plath. But we do observe that when Ted Hughes’s poetry speaks of a cold bleak landscape filled with hawks in the rain, battered cats, and predatory fishes hiding in pond, Plath projects the most complicated imagery of birth, death, flowers, trees and bees which are restricted, constrained, and expressed by difficult idioms.

Plath appears to be very much obstinate, annoyed and resentful when her Daddy passes away. Being a child, in reaction to it, she announces that “I ll’ never speak to God again!” All such mental agonies were the cause of the shock and disbelief continued into her adulthood. when the universe would not adhere to her wishes, she withdrew into rejection and depression, highlighting how the world let her down, how they failed to live up





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to her expectations, between God and her father who both had betrayed her. Even she had demanded that her mother Aurelia should sign a pledge not to remarry shortly after her father’s death. But it was an unfortunate that her mother Aurelia, adhered in her early thirties, which did not satisfy Sylvia and later she attacked her mother precisely for signing it. But such contrariness was that of a spoiled child. She was in a near continual state of torment, hurt, fear and unstable throughout school and university. She did her utmost to conform and fit in to be the model student and the model daughter insisting on perfection, for her and for others. She dyed her hair blonde and went in for several boyfriends in whom she desired to fulfill her desires and longings. In 1953, she spent a month as guest editor of the Mademoiselle, and shortly after that she told her mother Aurelia: “The world is so rotten, I want to die! Let’s die together”! Her mother understood by placing her in an institution where she was subjected to electric shock treatment and a betrayal she never forgot and later she recounted in her prose work, The Bell Jar. On returning home, Sylvia attempted suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pill what she has very vivaciously described: “At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you”. (Plath244, Daddy)

But fortunately, she was rescued in time. She was recovered, better diagnosis during a stay in a mental seizure facility. Plath returned to Smith College and accomplished her grade in 1955.

During her dwelling at Cambridge She met Ted Hughes, the British poet at. In Feb.1956, she came to read thirty poems written by Hughes. These poems were the composition of a gifted English poet who had created revolution in the field of poetry. On meeting him Sylvia was very much infatuated at the physical stature of Hughes and thought that he would be a suitable life-partner. Sylvia was so deeply inspired by the poetry of Ted that she took for reading and enjoying stories and folklores as per Ted’s choice. She was influenced not only by Ted’s poetic sensibilities but also by his strong personality. She got married with Ted Hughes on June 16, 1956 at the Church of St. George. Plath had to face much opposition from Ted’s relatives. The friends of Sylvia Plath also did not welcome her marriage with Ted Hughes. Some of her well-wishers thought that the marriage would be an obstacle in the blooming of her genius. Just after a couple of their sweet social tie while on honey-moon in Spain, it became clear to Sylvia that their marriage would not be as ideal as she imagined it would be.

It was the most unfortunate that really displeasure fell in the newly married conjugal life of Plath and Hughes. After few months Sylvia Plath left for London Town leaving Devon to a flat which was once occupied by W.B Yeats. She tried her best to make a new life for her children. But at the height of a freezing winter, depression, illness, despair and financial worries overtook her. On February 11, 1963, she committed suicide by gassing herself in the oven. She had carefully sealed off the children’s bedrooms to make safe. But just a few weeks earlier The Bell Jar had been published and she had also prepared Ariel for publication. Lots of bitter battles took place after Sylvia’s suicide between Pro-Plath and Pro-Hughes supporters. Ted’s life became more emotionally strained. Some people had felt that both Ted and his family had laid the blame for Sylvia’s suicide at Assia’s feet. Ted





bewildered many by making his sister Olwyn the agent for Sylvia’s estate, especially considering the antipathy that had existed between the two women. While Olwyn always acknowledged Sylvia’s poetic gift, she had also, according to Ronald Hayman, called her “a famous poetess Grace Kelly dreamt who descended on Yorkshire. An American student with a couple of poems in magazines”. When Anne Stevenson published her biography of Sylvia, Bitter Fame, in 1989, presents very much a pro-Hughes slant. It emerged that the book was effectively co-authored by Olwyn, particularly the final chapters.

Sylvia Plath had her initial pick up on poetry, The Colossus, published in England in 1960. That same year, she gave birth to her daughter Frieda. Two years later, Plath and Hughes welcomed a second child, a son named Nicholas. Unfortunately, the couple’s matrimony was unwell apart. After Hughes left her for an additional lady in 1962, Sylvia Plath fell in to a low depression. But being under the heavy mental illness, she wrote The Bell Jar (1963), which deals with a single immature woman’s mental breakdown. She published the novel under the pen name Victoria Lucas

Plath has also given a little scope to ventilate the socio cultural issues and behaviour of the then time. Sylvia Plath has intelligently juxtaposed and begun her novel by referring to one of the most important events of the early 1950's i.e. the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as they were both found guilty and sentenced to death. The case was appealed through the courts and in world opinion .Many felt they were being unfairly punished. But on June 19, 1953, they were both executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York. It was the burning issue in the then America .Again if we focus our attention further in the Bell Jar; we see how the protagonist Esther Greenwood returns home with all promises and dreams. He wants to presents her choices of life. The future paths are shown through the symbols of the Fig tree. Her choices were rather limited and most people's ideals were for a woman to be a lovely housewife. And although the final lines of the book are open-ended, I felt that it was positive and that Esther was on the right track. Her actions in the closing chapters had been self-directed and about achieving things for herself - the opposite of the frozen inertia that defined the slump into depression.

Much of the literary criticism devoted to Sylvia Plath has based on her biography. This is due to Plath’s unfortunate categorization as part of the ‘confessional’ school of poets, whose work, in reaction to the impersonality and irony of the high modernists. Such a view of Plath is still ubiquitous despite her own dismissive description of confessional poetry: “As if poetry were some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion”. As both the cause and consequence of Plath’s categorization as a confessional poet, the dramatic and famously tragic events of her life have also contributed to the abundance of biographically driven criticism. In the language of David Young we find that “before one has read much of her work, one has tumbled into the gossip, into the tabloid flattening of her artistic accomplishment, and the poems have begun to line up as lurid husband, her mother and father, or anyone else, happens to be on trial” (Young 1998, p. 18).







We clearly find that most of Plath’s sympathizers and detractors have read more often her poems from thematic point of view by overlooking the formal concerns, and also understands the reasons of her traumatic psychology. In the worst examples, critics read Plath’s poems as proof that she was self-obsessed, hysterical, and driven toward death from early on. The disappearance and destruction of Plath’s last journals, written during the most crucial period of her conjugal life intensify to the critics about its missing, the suicide, and the bitter relationship with Hughes etc.

Sylvia Plath was very much prone to her own Culture. Had she been a Jew; she would not have the problem of ‘Fascists’ much or less would she have such inner torment. “She hates Fascists because she loves them; because of their failure, she is through, despite everything,” interprets Alvarez. Daddy is a love on one hand poem but on the other hand where we find the note of suicide. Sylvia’s pretension in this poem of possibly being a concentration-camp of Jews in order to spite her ‘Panzer-man’ daddy who did not have the strength to survive past. Her own childhood was successful in motivating some critics. It made others annoyed. Calvin Bedient says that “When she writes as if she were as abused as a Nazi victim she climbs to self-importance over the bodies of the dead. She enters a moral sphere that her amoral personal imagination cannot apprehend”. According to Joyce Carol Oates the New York audience, is equally disgusted: “If she tells us she may be a bit of a ‘Jew,’ it is only to define herself, her sorrows, and not to involve our sympathies for the Jews of recent European history”. The distinguished Marxist-Jewish social and literary critic Irving Howe is absolutely outraged. That should exploit the Holocaust myth for her own purposes. It takes more brio than he himself ever mustered when he sent his scribbling to the publishers. In the view of Howe at Sylvia he states that “illegitimate comparisons to the Holocaust and states bitterly: There is something monstrous, utterly disproportionate, when tangled emotions about one’s father are deliberately compared with the historical fate of the European Jews” (p.28).Another writer believes he has sniffed out even greater rat. By claiming that Plath’s view of “the cycles of history” was the same as that of Yeats, which led the Irish poet “to a passive acceptance of fascism,” Jerome Mazzaro thinks that the purity Sylvia achieved through her ‘deaths’ is tainted: “Yet, the new purity that she gains has accomplished exactly what Alfred Rosenberg had imagined for the German race: a superman who can challenge ‘Herr God’ and ‘Herr Lucifer’ by having gained self-discipline. She has, in effect, undergone the dehumanization that Radin finds common in aboriginal African deities, although her poem ‘Brasilia’ (1963) once more binds the dreaming back to Nietzsche and Germany by referring to its survivors as ‘super-people’’. (29) Sylvia Plath probably had no real choice -- in an existential sense -- but to commit suicide. Her deed was strangely logical and quite proper, given the type of person and artist that she was. The resignation and total nihilism of her final poems are very much frightening: “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.” (Plath 272, Edge)

Also: “Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? Once one has been seized up

Without a part left over, Not a toe, not a finger, and used, Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains That lengthens from ancient cathedrals What is the remedy”? (Plath 268, Mystic)

Here we see a deep sense of alienation suffered by Plath that grounds to her non-rational consciousness of her race and culture, which finds no remedy, neither for the mystic nor for the intense and brilliant poet, searching for a cause to serve. If she had been born earlier and into the land of her fathers, she should likely have found it. It was just like the case with other well-known German women - a celebrity devotee of that man of mythic dimensions who ruled Germany for a brief period in this century, but there was none of this. She was another victim in the war still being waged against the West. She went down in a creative blaze, but, unfortunately, without definitively fingering her destroyers, as if poetry was some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion.

We also find The Bell Jar just after poetry vividly visualised by Plath to serve as the necessary backdrops to understand the context that she prompted to present a critique of psychiatry in The Bell Jar. It tells the story of a young woman who circulates in and out of mental hospitals, chronicling her mental illness and eventual hospitalization and shock treatment with almost clinical precision. Living in London, Plath set out to write the novel she referred to as a ‘pot-boiler’ in the spring of 1962—a period that coincided precisely with the months in which attacks on psychiatry by Goffman, Szasz, and Laing took centre stage in the British press. Looking at the popular mental illness novels of the 1950s for her model, Plath wanted to represent that “how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown”. “I must get out Snake Pit”, Plath wrote in her journal in March of 1959, referring to the best-selling 1946 novel by Mary Jane Ward: “There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it” (Stevenson, 154, 45).

The psychiatric institutions divided persons into normal and pathological, the middle-class institutions of The Bell Jar designate as ‘insane’ those women who fail from the conventional ways of womanhood. Esther who rejects marriage and motherhood, or Joan, the lesbian physicist has been victimised. Esther is torn between conventional and unconventional choices, and it is her indecision, according to the novel, that constitutes her neuroses. “I am never going to get married”, she tells her boyfriend Buddy Willard, who responds, predictably, “You're crazy”.(p.62). Esther tells him she is unable to decide between the city and the country, between marriage and career, between chastity and promiscuity. The novel figures this indecision in the image of a fig tree. Esther imagines her “life branching





out” before her “like the green fig tree" whose branches designate mutually exclusive options: “a husband and a happy home and children”; “a famous poet”; “a brilliant professor”; and “an amazing editor”. (p.62). “I am neurotic,” she explains to Buddy, invoking the diagnosis often counterpoised to the more intractable mental illness of the psychotic. Esther's unwillingness to marry is thus figured as a kind of mild mental illness, neurosis, and her prospective husband is deemed unsuitable in so far as he embodies the coercive practices of medical and mental health institutions. In this way, many of the novels most emphatically feminist moments find vivid expression in its attacks on psychiatry and on medicine. Buddy's patriarchal tendencies are visible in the “totalitarian” practices of the medical profession itself, so that oppressive medical and psychiatric institutions function as a figure for sexist institutions more broadly.

Plath’s novel demonstrates how the disenchantment with institutions seen in the cultural and legislative trends of the 1950s and early 60s would give impetus to the dissolution of health and welfare institutions in the subsequent two decades. Ironically, many of the first steps towards the shrinking of the welfare state stemmed not from the politics of Reagan and Thatcher, but from the anti-authoritarian polemics of figures like Kesey, Kerouac, and their contemporaries. What The Bell Jar ultimately showed was a woman struggling to become whole, not a woman who had reached some sense of stable self. When Plath brought this cultural network into her poetry, she tapped what has been called as the irreducible centre of public life to explain herself and her works in the context of her time and culture. The poetry of Sylvia Plath explodes into the cultural consciousness of 1960s shortly after her death, leaving the critics and readers to understand and explain her poetry that harnessed the powers of language, imagery, and emotion to lead her readers through the labyrinth of her life and times. The Ariel voice is presumed to date from 1961-1963, chronologically assessing her most famous works with the last years of her life. Yet this voice, so powerful and so controlled, is not, as many critics challenge, a sudden burst that exploded from the poet; rather, the emergence of Plath’s true voice is the result of years of meticulous study throughout the course of Plath’s maturation as an artist. Through this development of her unique voice, Plath further sought to explore the other voices and roles contained in her poetry, and the final resolution of self that is achieved within the Ariel poems.

Thus we too, find the elements of paradox, ingrained in her poetry and fiction, which emerged from her struggle to carve out a space for herself in between the contrasting worlds of America and England. Moreover, her writings are what remain as her true legacy. Her works as she writes in Burning the Letters, “immortal” (Plath, 204), a legacy held dear to the readers and critics and cultural historians cutting across time and place to understand its implications.

Works Cited:

Alvarez, Alfred. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide .Random House, 1972.Print. Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore:





Johns Hopkins University Press. Print. Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton, 1989. Howe, Irving. The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent in Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, Ed. Edward Butscher New York: Dodd, Mead. Print. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/twoviews.htm .Website. Mazzaro, Jerome. Sylvia Plath and the Cycles of History, in Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1979.Print. Oates, Joyce Carol. The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. London: OUP. 1990. Print. Orr, Peter, The Poet Speaks. New York: Harper & Row1966.Print. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber & Faber1966. Print. Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: New York: Harper & Row1981.Print. Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Print. -------.Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings. London: Faber and Faber1977. Print. -----.The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. New York: Anchor Books 2000. Young, David. 1998. Tree with an Attitude: Reading Plath Irreverently. Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 59 (Fall): 18-23.Print.





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