How Someone Can Be Smart, Lively, Beautiful and Intelligent, Yet Also Desperate!
Sylvia Plath (Reader alert: this write-up has content related to suicide attempts)
Being extraordinarily intelligent and publishing her first poem at the age of eight, being known as a wonderful young writer of her age (being awarded a Pulitzer prize, posthumously), and loving death at the same time, is something that would leave everyone in awe, wonder and a little bit of confusion.
She romanticized death through her words as:
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
— Sylvia Plath/ The Bell Jar
I'm a firm believer that writers live in a different world, or maybe, they create a world of their own, where they can take a breath with ease, where they do not have to inhale oppression, a world that is not indifferent to them but a refuge from the cruel and exhausting world.
I was sitting in my classroom, during the final years of my graduation, when everything had become too tiring for me to absorb. This is what literature did to me, at that time, it made me tired instead of being a refuge for me.
I was sitting in the last row, staring at the screen of my phone, waiting for a message from someone unknown to me, hearing my teacher who was delivering the lecture on a female poet, not absorbing any of the information.
Amidst all this, I heard a sentence that grabbed my attention:
'This was the poet who tried to commit suicide 3 times, and died on her 3rd attempt, leaving her 2 children with cookies to eat in their room.'
I looked straight up into my professor’s eyes and realized that he was also looking at me, directly in my eyes.
Maybe, he knew exactly what would make me listen to him.
Maybe, he knew what I had been thinking lately.
Maybe, he knew that this, suicide, was the thing that would make me forget my world for a moment.
After that sentence was uttered by him, I started listening to what he was saying, attentively. Even after the end of the class, I had only Plath in my mind. On reaching home, I started searching and researching everything about her, because many questions were bothering me;
- Why did she do so?
- How can a mother be so careless about her children who were still young, left eating cookies?
- What made her decide to die?
- What caused her life to be meaningless?
- Her children were not enough for her to continue living no matter what?
- How could she be a poet so dearly admired at her young age but still her thoughts haunt her?
And a train of thoughts and questions...
Then, eventually, I had my answer.
The answer I deduced was entirely subjective. Other people may have different interpretations as per their thinking capabilities and the way they perceive things.
But, I was able to understand the terrible thoughts she might have been subjected to.
Maybe, it was her loss of hope that led her to this haunting action. Throughout her life, she had been trodden by a male-dominated society. Many of her poems depict this as one of the reasons she took that heinous step. The fact involved in this is, in her early years, when she was young and energetic to conquer the world, she had to face the traumatic experiences, disguised in her father’s affection.
Her contempt for her father is clear in one of her poems: “Daddy”.
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time — —
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
I wonder if her delicate soul would have hopes of getting out of that hellish situation, soon after her marriage.
But what happened was just a shift in the masters!
A shift in just the relationship, from father to spouse, but not in the way they would treat her.
They both destroyed the beauty she was! They both caused her the misery she had gone through!
They both lead her to decide to die without waiting for God to give His consent. She couldn’t wait for it. She had to die as early as possible.
She attempted suicide once but didn’t die.
She did it again and survived.
She didn’t give up and was ready to try to die again, for the third time.
With every attempt, she gained more energy to die, a bit of solid proof that her life should end.
Albert Camus in 'The Myth of Sisyphus' argued that,
Life is essentially meaningless, although humans continue to try to impose order on existence and to look for answers to unanswerable questions. According to Camus, the first step an individual must take is to accept the fact of this absurdity. If, as for Sisyphus, suicide is not a possible response, the only alternative is to rebel by rejoicing in the act of rolling the boulder up the hill. Camus further argues that with the joyful acceptance of the struggle against defeat, the individual gains definition and identity.
Camus argued this, just to strengthen his existential idea that the struggle in finding meaning in life is what we all live for... And a person must be happy if he finds one!
I don’t know what was the thing that made Sylvia’s life meaningless. She had many reasons to live;
- she had children,
- she had the talent to write,
- she could write more and gift the literature of her time with the best pieces of writing,
- she could teach young learners so much about poetry, literature, and maybe life itself.
But she just didn't want to live for this, at all.
Digging a bit deeper into it, one can realize that she did exactly what she had been experiencing since her childhood. She did the cruelest thing a parent can do to their children.
Theo Faber, a psychotherapist and the first-person narrator of Alex Michaelides’s book The Silent Patient, believes that pain and rage originate “in the land before memory, in the world of early childhood, with abuse and mistreatment”; thus, to solve the mystery of an adult’s psyche,”
A traumatic childhood may develop a shattered personality. The shrieks, the screams, and the tears a child is not allowed to display may later burst out in the form of revenge, revenge affecting those who are innocent, who do not deserve to bear the consequences of the actions they didn’t take!
Sylvia did this to her children.
She made them eat the fruit of the seeds they didn’t sow.
She was equally cruel as her father and her husband.
She became the same demon that she was afraid of the most.
She couldn’t save the world from the things she, herself, was afraid of the most!
