The first time I heard about Plath, it was when I had started reading The Bell Jar unknowing of how someone as complex as her, had written a story of her own life hiding behind Esther Greenwood, hiding behind Victoria Lucas, and hiding behind the fiction. As someone who has always hidden parts of himself in poetry, trying to write a story that one is not accounted for- there is a strange resonance one feels when they read The Bell Jar. But once I completed the Bell Jar, there was this clawing feeling that kept scratching- what happened to Sylvia? What killed her? What happened before New York?
It was not always sad. We often see Plath as a bipolar manic depressive whose entire life was just an episode of waiting to kill herself, but it was a series of events- a slow gradual progression towards feeling estranged, a revival, and finally unable to survive. Plath had a troubled relationship with her authoritarian father, and his death felt more like a betrayal than something tragic to her. In “Daddy” she writes- “Every woman adores a Fascist” comparing her plight to that of the Jews in Nazi Germany. But as they moved to Australia, Plath’s literary genius showed itself as she wrote for magazines and then moved to New York to write for Mademoiselle- a magazine which included the likes of Dylan Thomas. It was here that she realizes that all her awards and academic success have no real value. While for years, where she had felt like a literary genius, New York is unforgiving to her where she is mocked for her accent and lack of spontaneity. It is in New York, Plath feels like losing the one thing that has driven her throughout her life and that is her ambition where she says in the Bell Jar when asked about what she plans to do after graduation as “I don’t know.” New York is a strange place for her where she is attacked by men, sees sexual degradation but at the same time survives, goes on dates, enjoys her life, and learns how to face the city. This part is where the depression takes root and when she is denied admission into a writing class at Harvard, her spirits break and starts the next chapter of her life where depression takes control.
“It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative — whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.” Plath writes in her journal on June 20, 1958. Having been denied admission into the writing class, Plath stops eating or sleeping and words stop making sense. And that is when it happens for the first time- her first suicide attempt where she locks herself in the basement having left a note that she is going for a walk. She survives the attempt where she vomits out the sleeping pills and is consequently hospitalized- the account of which forms the story of her only published novel The Bell Jar. In one of her letters, Plath conveys that she wants to give up her old self and form a new one. It is surprising to see how unlikable she becomes, where she is extremely selfish, treating her mother with disdain and not feeling the slightest bit of remorse when her friend kills herself. Yet we see, that is the freest that Plath feels since her moving to New York. She goes out and fucks a Harvard professor to who she is not at all attracted. She dumps the bouquet her mother sends her. She constantly tells Joan how she hates her and finds her sickening. At the end of The Bell Jar, though she might have approved to go out into the world again, Sylvia knows that she is still essentially the same person that walked in.
She returns to Smith and she is better than before, ambitious and driven, but a lot carefree than before. She starts dating a lot of boys and sleeping with them. She goes to Cambridge having won the Fulbright Scholarship and this is where she met Ted Hughes, her to-be husband.
When we talk about Ted, we mostly remember his infidelity or their divorce but Hughes and Plath had good times. For once Plath writes, she felt like she was living a dream where she wanted to live a rural life, have five children, to write, cook, and to shun the publicity of literary London. They would sit in a boat where Hughes would narrate poetry to her. They would visit their neighbors and there was laughter- the one word that people don’t talk a lot about Plath. Plath’s relationship with Hughes deteriorated with time. They decided to rekindle their life in the Devon countryside and invited couples. One of the couples was the Wevills, the tenants of their London home. Assia was so ecstatic about the visit that she said in her rich deep challenging voice- “I am going to seduce Ted.” Half of the visit later, one morning as Assia made salad in the kitchen with Ted while Plath and David Wevill sat outside chatting, David recalls hearing muffled voices from the kitchen and Sylvia going really still. She didn’t speak a lot after that. Assia later told that Plath had seen her and Ted kissing in the kitchen. However, this didn’t affect the relationship between the four of them as Plath forgot it as something that wasn’t serious. Ted on the other hand, who as Janet Malcolm says, “went through swaths of women like a guy harvesting corn” didn’t stop at that and on his visit to London for a recording at BBC, having not found Assia at her studio left a note- “I have come to see you, despite all marriages.” This started a series of them sending each other blades of grasses from London to Devon and back. Assia, pretending to be a man called Court Green asking for Ted, and an enraged Plath ripped apart the cord of the phone and acting on her suspicions raided Hughes study. She burnt his letters to Assia Wevill in a backyard bonfire and Hughes flew to London finally deciding to leave Sylvia. Assia was never shy and flaunted her relationship with Hughes talking about how virile he was in bed and how her husband was less of a man. One fine day, as Assia told David that she was going to meet Ted, the usually calm man gave in to his rage and rushed with a knife to the station but couldn’t find Ted and later on tried to kill himself instead.
Torn between her love and sympathy, Assia lied to David that Hughes raped her. Assia was never the initiator but the responder. Hughes and Assia still carried on meeting secretly. While Sylvia got to know and moved to London, David had no idea till he turned 40. On 7th February, Plath wrote, “The whole crazy divorce stuff was a bluff." On 11th February, we found her gassed to death, ironically in a kitchen.
After Hughes left, there was a change in the style of Plath’s writing. It changed from poetry that was replete with metaphors, riddles, and misdirection to something that was unabashedly direct and explicitly personal. In December, she moved to London with her two children. Scared of not being able to financially sustain herself, she started sending copies of Bell Jar to American publishers who rejected it saying, “We didn’t feel you had managed to use your materials successfully in a novelistic way.”Her fear reaches such a high point as she mentions in her journal that she starts working on a play based on her experience at the asylum. She told herself- “I am a fool if I don’t relive it, recreate it.” She took to journalism, writing essays, wrote a lot of poems some of which were published, went out with friends where she hated on Ted’s betrayal, and talked about her future plans. But soon after on 11th February she sealed herself from her children in a lonely kitchen, she placed her head in an oven and gassed herself to death thus ending a life which by no means, was ordinary.
In an ironic twist of fate, her death or more so her manner of death made her even more famous where Ariel, her collection of poems published posthumously came to be regarded as a relic, a poetry written on bones. Hughes took control of her estate and her works. He destroyed the journal entries written in the period before her death stating that they would be too hard on the children. He went on to use Plath’s new gained fame past her death to send the Bell Jar to American publishers again, despite Plath’s mother completely against it. He still maintained that the work was subpar and after a few years will be reduced to just text taught at schools. However, Hughes didn’t have it easy where many women accused him of Plath’s death. In 1972, Robin Morgan wrote the memorable rhyme in The Arraignment,
I accuse
Ted Hughes.
Women would chip off the Hughes surname from Sylvia’s grave every time it was repaired. However later, when her mother published The Letters Home, we get to see that maybe the conflict within her was far beyond Ted but somewhere ingrained in her childhood.
Accusing Ted for her death seems injustice, because the problems with Plath existed way before Ted. She was a woman who was torn between her ambition and her personal life. She was a compulsive overachiever who also wanted to be seen as a nice person by everyone. She was always in a fight with herself where she wanted to devote all her time to writing but also wanted to be a good mother and wife. She wanted to be too much and couldn’t see the impossibility of her situation. When you don’t like the person you are, you are constantly fighting against yourself trying to be something that you can’t be without giving up one thing or the other. Plath refused to give up anything and thought that she can be all, and thus we saw how she broke down- first in New York and finally, ten years later, forever in London.
