Sylvia Plath Is There No Way Out Of The Mind

Explore the presentation of disturbed minds in Macbeth and in the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

“Is there no way out of the mind?”

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 27th of October 1932 just before World War II into a German/Austrian family. Plath suffered from clinical depression and tried to commit suicide multiple times, she was successful on her fourth attempt, which ended her life in February of 1963. Macbeth was a tragedy play written by William Shakespeare, it was first performed in 1611.

In comparison of the texts there are many similarities, one of which being that Lady Macbeth and Plath both grapple with the loss of their fathers. Lady Macbeth references her father when she
says ‘Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done’t (2.2, 12-13)’ This shows that Lady Macbeths father has passed, she see’s King Duncan sleeping and laying in bed and it reminds her of her father as he once slept. This shows that Lady Macbeth cannot kill him as herself and her father had a good relationship and she loved her father so she could not kill King Duncan as she felt as if she was killing her own father. This reference to her father is one of the few traces of womanly feeling that Lady Macbeth shows; Shakespeare shows a more mellow side to Lady Macbeth’s utter inhumanity.
Sylvia Plath also grapples with the loss of her father this is shown in her poem ‘Daddy’ when she talks about her feelings about her father and how his death affected her.
She says ‘When I was ten they buried you’ She shows that she had to bury the feelings and thoughts of her father at such a young age, which has troubled her so much that she becomes depressed in her later teens. She talks about her father being close to her heart and then about how she never liked him and compares him to Hitler and the Nazi’s. This is shown when she says ‘ With your Luftwaffe and your gobbledygoo and your neat moustache’ She describes her father here as being a Nazi by showing him as being in the Air force for Germany during the war and gives and Hitler image of her father when she talks about his neat moustache. An image of Hitler is created in our minds as Hitler had a neat black moustache and so did her father. She also talks about her father being in Hitler’s supreme race. She describes her father to have ‘Aryan eye, bright blue’ this shows that Hitler would of considered Otto Plath to be part of his supreme race. Hitler considered those with blonde hair and blue eyes to be the supreme race of Germany, this was ironic because Hitler himself had brown hair and brown eyes. Plath talks about how much she wants to get back to her father, when she says ‘Get back, back, back to you.’ She talks about killing herself to get to her father, to meet him in the afterlife. The repetition of ‘back’
could be used to represent the amount of times she has tried to commit suicide to get back her father but failed. She also says ‘I thought even the bones would do’ this shows that she thought that even being buried next to him would heal and soothe her. This shows how close she wants to be with him maybe even to close. In her poem she shows some hints of Electra complex. The Electra complex is known to be a stage of a young girls life around the age of 5-7 of which young girls show abnormal feelings towards their fathers, they show feelings that they love them more than as a daughter but as a lover. Sylvia Plath shows feelings of her trying to get her father to be her lover but can’t so she finds someone who demonstrates his features and qualities, this is shown when she says ‘ I made a model of you’ she refers here to Ted Hughes her spouse. She married someone who reminded her exactly as her father showing inappropriate feelings towards her father. Old wives tales say that girls either marry someone like her father of someone opposite; here Plath shows that she married someone exactly like her father.

Another similarity between two texts is that Lady Macbeth and Sylvia Plath struggle with motherhood.
Lady Macbeth references her motherhood in the first act of the play when she says ‘ I have given suck and know How tender’tis to love the babe that milks me (1.7, 54-55)’ Lady Macbeth creates a tame image here of a mother nursing her child. This is juxtaposed by the following phrase ‘while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from its boneless gums And dashed the brains out (1.7, 56-58)’ which creates a violent scene of a mother brutally killing its child. This comes as a surprise to the reader because there is no talk about a child of Macbeth throughout the rest of the play; this is the only time Macbeth’s offspring is mentioned throughout the whole entire play. Macbeth makes references to the ‘fruitless crown’ and the ‘barren scepter’ in his ‘gripe’ manifests this sense of insecurity. There is a clear semantic pattern in Macbeth’s soliloquy, whereby Shakespeare has used a number of words relating to reproduction. The word choice ‘fruitless’ links to the common phrase ‘fruit of the womb’ to refer to a person’s child. The word also means useless or redundant. It follows, then, that Macbeth sees himself as redundant for being unable to produce an heir and therefore to secure a future line of kings from his offspring. Again, the same can be said for his use of the word ‘barren.’ Interestingly, this term is most common used to talk about women who are unable to
conceive a child. Macbeth through his use of these two words is casting himself into a female gender role, arguably emasculating himself on account of his inability to perform sexually and produce a child. Lady Macbeth having stated that she has nursed her child with her own breasts, must have had a child, as women can only nurse themselves if they have carried a baby. Lady Macbeth must have had a child. A critic namely of Scott McAteer suggest a theory of Lady Macbeth and the loss of a child. He suggests that Lady Macbeth shows signs of post-natal depression; he also suggests that Lady Macbeth shows signs of depression from losing a child that most other women do statistically after losing a child.