Relevant Background

Sylvia Plath [1932-1963]

Relevant Background

·  Sylvia Plath was born in Boston USA. She grew up in a well-off middle class home on the coast.

·  Sylvia's early years were influenced by the living near the ocean. ‘I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.’

·  Her experiences of family life caused her to feel inner conflicts and pain.

·  Her father Otto died when she was eight. His Polish-German origins and unnecessary early death from a leg problem troubled her later in life. In addition, depression was widespread in her father’s family.

·  Due to her mother’s influence, Sylvia tried to live up to an old fashioned feminine ideal of perfection and purity. While keeping up this front as an adult, Sylvia rebelled against the conservative role she was expected to play. The consequent inner conflicts are revealed in her poetry and letters.

·  Plath hid her lack of confidence behind a mask of strident energy and brilliant achievement. Though she was an outstanding student, Plath never fulfilled the very high expectations she set for herself. She experienced self-doubt and depression. However, to the world she presented a carefree, offhand attitude. She pushed herself relentlessly at work.

·  Much of Plath’s poetry reveals her struggle against herself and the world.

·  Plath suffered a nervous breakdown in Smith College, Boston, after intense overwork in 1953. She was given bi-polar electro-convulsive shock treatments; a horror alluded to in the poem ‘Elm’of 1962. This treatment further damaged her sanity, and she attempted suicide. Six months in a private hospital set her on her feet again, but she never fully recovered. Depression and the threat of insanity remained a problem.

·  Plath also went to university in Cambridge, England after she won a scholarship in 1955.

·  Her writings outside the syllabus showed she was angry about double-standard behaviour in society. Plath claimed for herself the right to as much sexual freedom as men had in the repressed and smug 1950s society. She declared she was in favour both an erotic and intellectual lifestyle.

·  When she met Ted Hughes, a Cambridge poet, she felt that life with him would be ideal in a physical and aesthetic sense. The two were married in London on Bloomsday 16 June 1956.

·  Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes returned to Boston in 1957. Sylvia worked for one unhappy year as a lecturer in the cold arid atmosphere of Smith College. Despite her self-criticism, others regarded her as a successful teacher.

·  For a while after her marriage, Sylvia focused so much Hughes’ poetic work that she found it difficult to develop her own poetry. She was recognised for being the wife of Hughes rather than for her own poetry. During this early part of her marriage, she wrote such poems as the satirical ‘The Times are Tidy’and the philosophical‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’.

·  Sylvia was beginning to have doubts about Hughes’ love for her. She needed constantly to be reassured.

·  Sylvia turned to part-time work as a secretary in a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, copying out patients' histories, which often included dreams. She also secretly resumed therapy with the woman psychiatrist who had helped her after her earlier breakdown in 1953. This influenced her poetic writing.

·  At this time, 1959, Plath and Hughes concentrated intensely on helping each other’s poetic writing.

·  Plath’s poetry became more confessional in style after she attended a seminar run by the American poet Robert Lowell.

·  From 1959, her poetry began to evoke her intensifying mental illness.

·  Under Hughes’ influence, they moved to England in December 1959 at a time when Sylvia was writing good poetry—she had written the material forThe Colossus and Other Poemswhich she got published in October 1960 in England. This book was well received.

·  When they left Boston Sylvia was five months pregnant with her first child, Frieda. During her pregnancy with Frieda in 1960, Plath devoted much physical energy to home making in her London flat. Privately, she felt fatigued and barely able to keep on living. She was reluctant to reveal her distress.

·  Plath’s writing became both an escape and a burden.

·  In February 1961 a new pregnancy ended in a miscarriage that left Sylvia feeling depressed. At this time she wrote the poem‘Morning Song’.

·  Plath and her husband moved to a medieval farmhouse in Devon, in the South of England, in the autumn of 1961. At that time she composed ‘Finisterre’,based on a memory of a holiday in France and ‘Mirror’.

·  Personal jealousies, differences between British and American views of gender roles, rural isolation and a return of Sylvia's depression created complications in her marriage.

·  After her son Nicholas's birth in January 1962, Plath began to realise Hughes was unfaithful; she expressed herself through increasingly angry—and powerful—poems. It was during the following April that Plath wrote ‘Pheasant’ in opposition to her husband’s game shooting and ‘Elm’,which dealt with his infidelity and other subjects.

·  In June 1962 Plath started beekeeping and was briefly overjoyed with it. Her father had been a beekeeper and had written two books about bees. In July 1962, Sylvia confirmed Ted's affair. That month she began ‘Poppies in July’.

·  Sylvia and Ted separated in October 1962 despite sharing a visit to Ireland that September where they met a number of prominent Irish poets.

·  Consequently, Plath became very depressed and became addicted to sleeping pills

·  In the following month of October 1962, Plath wrote at least 26 of the Ariel poems. She wrote about her beekeeping in the poem ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. That poem referred to her brief time as a beekeeper but was also an expression of her unhappy inner thoughts and feelings.

·  The magazines to which she sent many of these poems refused them, adding further to her depression.

·  Caring for her children and friendships with other women became increasingly important to Plath.

·  In December 1962, Sylvia Plath left Devon, took the children with her to London and moved into an apartment once occupied by WB Yeats.

·  As Plath tried to make a new life for herself, very bad winter weather added to her depression. She hated being without a telephone, had bouts of illness and had the hassle of caring for her two infants.

·  As she became increasingly depressed, she composed the poem ‘Child’in January 1963.

·  She committed suicide by sleeping pills and gas inhalation on 11 February 1963.

·  Most of the poems dealing with her mental trauma were published after her suicide in 1963 in the volumesAriel, Crossing the Water,andWinter Trees.
These comments shed further light on the Plath:

·  She was a bright, intelligent, and determined young woman with a need to succeed; she had a burning desire to write.

·  She dreamed of the comfort of a home of her own where she could belong and be loved for herself.

·  She worked very hard, pushing herself relentlessly, whether in her studies, her teaching, in her relationships or her writing.

·  In its blend of amusing self-criticism and potent rage, her work anticipated the feminist writing that appeared in the later 1960s and the 1970s. But her work also transcended feminism.

·  Her work often reveals a harsh, demonic, devastating inner-self.

·  Plath was a self-revealing poet, but do not ignore her craft. Don’t pay too much attention to her personal history or legend while you ignore her art.

Themes

1. Plath struggles against herself and the world.
Select from these examples to illustrate conflict in Plath’s poetry. Plath struggles against her inner and external worlds.
She fears emotional exhaustion:
‘Fear of total neutrality… this season of fatigue’ [Black Rook]
She railed at the smug conformity of contemporary culture:
‘Unlucky the hero born in this province of the stuck record’ [Times Tidy]
She is troubled by human frailty and vulnerability:
‘Your nakedness shadows our safety’ [Morning Song]
She protests against the futility of history and war:
‘Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars’ [Finisterre]
She battles against a negative self-image:
‘An old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish’ [Mirror]
She is embarrassed by her unwitting intrusion into a natural scene:
‘I trespass stupidly’ [Pheasant]
She is shocked by her powerful, violent and uncontrolled subconscious:
‘A wind of such violence will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek’ [Elm]
She battles against inner demons:
‘I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me’ [Elm]
She fights and surrenders to mental exhaustion:
‘I am incapable of more knowledge’ [Elm]
She is numbed by her failed relationship:
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns’ [Poppies]
She battles against her deep fears:
‘The box is locked, it is dangerous I have to live with it overnight’ [Beebox]
She tries to fight off her neurosis so she can be a mother:
‘This troublous wringing of hands’ [Child]
2.Plath’s poetry depicts her quest for poetic inspiration and vision:
In her early poems, like ‘Black Rook’, Plath sees inspiration as transcendent, something that would announce itself to her from the external world. Plath’s language implies that she awaits a visitation of beauty, like the Annunciation by the angel in the Bible. Plath longs for an occasional ‘portent’ or ‘back talk from the mute sky’. She doesn’t believe in religious epiphany; but she uses Christian language as an analogy to convey her longing. Her longing is for even brief moments of revelation from things, nature or the universe:
‘As if a celestial burning took possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—Thus hallowing an interval otherwise inconsequent’.
Throughout the poem ‘Black Rook’, Plath uses ‘fire’ and associated words as an analogy for poetic inspiration or vision.See the extended note on this point inImagerybelow.
In ‘Black Rook’, Plath is resigned to the fact that inspiration involves a ‘long wait’. The euphoria of inspiration is ‘rare, random’ and brief.
By the time Plath Wrote‘Finisterre’four years later, she had ceased to seek or discern enlightenment or any transcendent reality in nature and the universe:
‘Our Lady of the Shipwrecked …
does not hear what the sailor or the peasant is saying –
She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea’ [Finisterre] .
Instead, she discerns:
‘Black admonitory cliffs’ and ‘Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea’.
Plath’s perception of the world is therefore very bleak.
In the poem ‘Mirror’,the poet’s quest for beauty and vision has turned inwards. She gazes inwards towards the self. She seeks despairingly for enlightenment through self-examination. What she finds appals her:
‘A woman bends over me, searching my reaches for what she really is… tears and an agitation of hands’.
In‘Pheasant’, Plath declares her atheistic stance:
‘I am not mystical. It isn't
As if I thought it had a spirit. It is simply in its element.’
However, Plath shows that not all her poems are bleak. She experiences the aesthetic beauty of nature. She enjoys the beauty of a natural creature in its environment:
‘It unclaps, brown as a leaf, and loud,
Settles in the elm, and is easy.’

In ‘Elm’Plath probes her subconscious, and states she is saturated with self-knowledge. Plath experiences harrowing visions within the inner self. Plath invents a demon in her subconscious that gives her a very self-destructive vision:
‘I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?—
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.’ [Elm]
In‘Poppies in July’,Plath seems so emotionally exhausted that she has given up the rational pursuit of the truth or any kind of vision. She longs for drugged relief, for a ‘colourless’ state:
‘Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules’.
In ‘Child’Plath has lost the capacity to find beauty for herself:
‘this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star’
But she feels a desire to provide visions of wonder and beauty for her infant’s eye:
‘I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new’ [Child]
3. Plath explores her own depression.
Plath is exhausted and aimless:
‘not seek any more in the desultory weather some design…
this season of fatigue’ [Black Rook]
Plath predicts her own fading away, destruction or ‘effacement’:
‘I'm no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind's hand’ [Morning Song]
Plath uses a bleak landscape to portray her own despair:
‘This was the land's end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,
Cramped on nothing. Black
Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding
With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,
Whitened by the faces of the drowned.
Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks…
Bay of the Dead’ [Finisterre]
Plath reveals intense grief:
‘When they free me, I am beaded with tears’ [Finisterre]
Plath confesses her deep anguish:
‘She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands’ [Mirror]
Plath is very self-critical:
‘I trespass stupidly. Let be, let be.’ [Pheasant]
Plath’s fears becomes ever more nightmarish:
‘I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me’ [Elm]
Plath reveals that she is inflicting suffering on herself:
‘Is it for such I agitate my heart’ [Elm]
Plath confesses the traumatic effect of electric-convulsive treatment:
‘I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires’ [Elm]
Plath confesses that isolation and lack of love haunt her:
‘I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love’ [Elm]
Plath reveals that she is becoming powerless to deal with her illness:
‘Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will’ [Elm]
Plath has moments when she longs to escape her mind through drugs: ‘Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, dulling and stilling’ [Poppies]
Plath also experiences anger and fear at her condition, comparing her inner demons to a new consignment of bees:
‘It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.’ [Beebox]
Plath reveals her mental torture two weeks before her suicide:
‘this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star’ [Child]
4. Plath explores aspects of childhood and childhood imagination:
Imagination:
‘the talking cat’ [Times Tidy]
Newness and vulnerability:
‘New statue in a drafty museum’ [Morning Song]
The sense of wonder:
‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new…
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical’ [Child]