by Kathryn Andrews, Desert Palm United Church of Christ Council and W.I.S.E. Committee
For many years, I knew Sylvia Plath only as an author who ended her life at age 30 after producing an excellent but depressing book called The Bell Jar. That understanding changed after I read Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. This biography celebrates Plath as a disciplined and prolific artist who helped to reform modern poetry and posthumously earned the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems. The book also contains a sobering history of Plath’s struggle with mental health issues.
Plath’s family was riddled with mental illness. Her immigrant father engaged in a slow-moving suicide by refusing treatment for diabetes for two years. He died in 1940 when Plath was eight. The book points out that young children who lose a parent run an increased risk of suicide later in life. Plath fit that pattern. Unknown to Plath, her paternal grandmother had died in an Oregon insane asylum years before. When Plath’s own depression surfaced at age 20, doctors repeatedly subjected her to a primitive form of electroshock therapy without anesthetic. According to Clark, Plath “was at the mercy of a patriarchal medical system that assumed that highly ambitious, strong-willed women were neurotic. As women, Plath and her mother had no power to defy the system.”
The absence of her father and family financial worries galvanized and haunted Plath. She was able to partially finance her education at Smith by selling her poems and stories to national magazines. Plath later won a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge. There she met and married Ted Hughes, who eventually became England’s Poet Laureate. Each contributed to the other’s professional growth; both were working toward an “unliterary” poetry “composed as much for the ear as for the eye.” Their relationship was progressive for its time, but also volatile. Plath seethed over the patriarchy and male humanist tradition that frequently denied her recognition while celebrating her husband’s accomplishments. In Daddy, Plath rages against her lost father, who also personifies “a bankrupt culture” and “patriarchal tormentors.” Linking her father and husband, Plath writes, “I made a model of you . . .and I said I do, I do” but by the end of the poem Plath declares: “I’m through.”
Following the birth of their second child and her husband’s departure, Plath entered a new level of depression while also taking her art to a new level. Plath’s own mental health crisis and her father’s immigrant struggles gave her insights into the life of the outcast, and her writings from this period explore the viewpoints of marginalized mothers, refugees, and Jews. She became one of the first poets to write about miscarriage and post-partum anxiety. More generally, her poems “open up new aesthetic possibilities that would change the direction of modern poetry.” The darkness also came through, as in Sheep in Fog: “My bones hold a stillness, the far/Fields melt my heart./They threaten/To let me through to a heaven/Starless and fatherless, a dark water.”
Plath would not live to see widespread critical acclaim or her works become best-sellers. As her depression deepened, Plath feared another round of botched electroshock therapy. She ended her life on the morning she was scheduled to enter a psychiatric hospital. But as Plath’s daughter later wrote, and Red Comet affirms, “The art was not to fall.”
