Sylvia Plath Research Paper

"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I 've a call."

Sylvia Plath wrote these lines, from her poem "Lady Lazarus," in the winter of 1962 (Barnard 75), only months before taking her own life at the age of thirty (Barnard 23). It is an oft quoted line, containing in it much of the ironic and morbid outlook for which she has become famous. Driven by intense perfectionism and plagued by the unnecessary death of her father, Sylvia Plath crafted deeply personal poetry that expresses a feeling of incompleteness and a romantic view of death.

Plath 's poetry is full of symbols and allusions cryptic to those unfamiliar with her biography, so it is necessary to begin any analysis of her work with a brief account of her life. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 near Boston and for much of her childhood lived near the sea, which finds its way into many of her poetic images (Barnard 14). Her father, Otto Emil Plath, was an immigrant from Germany and her mother, Aurelia Schober, a second generation Austrian American (Barnard 13). Allusions to her German heritage and to World War Two era Europe abound in her work.

Doubtlessly the most significant and defining chapter of her biography is on the death
of her father. He was a very educated man and a professor of biology and German at Boston University. When his health began failing in 1936, he diagnosed himself with lung cancer. Convinced medicine could not save his life, he continued teaching and refused medical attention for three years. When his illness was finally correctly identified as diabetes, it was already too late to save his life. He died in 1940 while Sylvia was eight (Barnard 15). This event marks the defining point in her life and is the focus of much of her poetry. Many suggest Plath 's poetry stems from the poet 's inability to mourn her father 's death (Ford, On Daddy); fearing the psychological damage it could cause them, Aurelia Plath did not take her children to their father 's funeral or to visits of the cemetery (Schultz). In Sylvia 's mind, her father 's death was more a mysterious disappearance than a natural, real event.

While attending Smith College in 1953, Sylvia was selected to travel to New York for the managing editor position of Mademoiselle 's annual summer College Issue. Her busy schedule of interviewing literary celebrities and the hectic atmosphere of the city caused her to enter a period of self doubting and confusion (Barnard 18). Writing home to her brother, she explained, "I can 't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated" (Letters Home 117). Days after returning home, still dazed from her experiences in New York, she received a rejection letter from a summer fiction writing class at Harvard she had applied to and fell into a severe mood of dejection and depression. In August, at the age of 21, she left a note to her mother that she was going for a walk, took a large dose of sleeping pills, and crawled underneath the family 's house to die, her first of many suicide attempts. She took too many of the drugs, however, and vomited them up. She was discovered by her younger brother, Warren, three days later, pale, bloody, and in critical condition, and narrowly survived the event. "Unable to cope and, as she believed, unable to live up to others ' expectations of her, she had attempted suicide" (Barnard 18).

Sylvia checked into McLean Hospital, undergoing bizarre "electric shock" and "insulin shock" therapies (Letters Home 131) common in psychiatric wards in the first half of the century. By winter, Plath and her doctors felt she was ready to return to school and complete her final three semesters at Smith College. She graduated summa cum laude in 1955 with a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge University (Barnard 19).

"The seven years which followed marked a period of great activity and promise in Sylvia Plath 's life" (Barnard 19). She continued writing and successfully pursuing academic achievement, and, in March of 1956, met the poet Ted Hughes. They quickly fell wildly in love and married June 16 of the same year (Barnard 19). Although she sold her first volume of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems, to William Heinemann Publishers in early 1960 (Barnard 21), most of the previous three years were devoted to other pursuits. She had become chiefly Ted 's editor, typist, and agent, sometimes feeling that she was becoming only "Ted Hughes 's wife." Additionally, Frieda Rebecca, the couple 's first of two children, was born on April 1, 1960, and Sylvia the poet took a backseat to Sylvia the mother (Barnard 21). With the publishing of The Colossus in America and airtime on BBC Radio during the summer of 1962, she began receiving some literary recognition; however, she felt increasingly outshined by her accomplished husband. She soon discovered he had been having affairs, and by the summer 's end the marriage had fallen apart. Ted moved to London (Barnard 22).

"Alone in Devon with her two children, Plath was alternately depressed and hopeful, but always busy... She wrote voluminously" (Barnard 24). Assuring her mother of her excitement and happiness, she wrote home, "I am a genius of a writer... I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name." (Letters Home 468). Sylvia moved into a flat in W. B. Yeats 's former home in December (Barnard 23), and wrote to her mother that "the next five years of my life look heavenly" (Letters Home 490). In the early hours of February 11, 1963, however, she took sleeping pills and gassed herself in her kitchen (Barnard 27). The poetry she had written so prolifically over the previous year was published in two posthumous volumes, Winter Trees and Ariel (Barnard 74), and did indeed make her name.

Sylvia Plath 's poetry is deeply personal. "Lady Lazarus," perhaps Plath 's most quoted poem, revolves around her first suicide attempt. She speaks of killing herself once every decade. "What a million filaments," she says of it, referencing the electroshock therapy she sustained at McLean Hospital. Describing her first serious attempt, she says, "They had to call and call/ And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls." This, of course, is a reference to her three days spent underneath the house.

Much of Sylvia Plath 's poetry was inspired by her relationships with the two men in her life, Ted Hughes and her father. Her most celebrated poem, "Daddy," focuses on the effect her father 's death had on her life. Otto 's name even seems to be hidden in the poem 's first line, "which struggles, almost baby-like, to articulate his name: 'Y oudo n otdo, y oudo n otdo ' (line respaced)." (Hilton 9 of 9). His "one gray toe/ Big as a Frisco seal" is a reference to her father 's gangrene caused by untreated diabetes. The poem also recalls her first suicide attempt and blames her troubled marriage with Ted on the lack of a father figure, writing

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

Plath was never allowed to mourn her father 's death and so was never able to accept it. His absence tortured her, and so she sought out a comparable figure to replace him. Naturally, she chose one who would torture her, with "a love of the rack and the screw." So tortured was she by her father 's absence that she went so far as to call him the devil, usually portrayed with hoofed feet:

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

She felt completely removed from her father and heritage, to the extent that her German father became a Nazi and she a Jew, ensnared in concentration camp barbed wire at every attempt to understand or connect with him:

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

At the end of the poem, as if liberated by the realization of the nature of her obsession with her father and her relationship with Ted, she insists that her father 's influence over her is over, that she has killed him, and

If I 've killed one man, I 've killed two--

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

The connection between her father and her ex-husband is emphasized further in this stanza--the vampire who drank Sylvia 's blood for seven years can just as easily be Otto or Ted. In fact, many critics suggest he is both (Ford, On Daddy). In any case, killing her father necessarily kills Ted. The poem ends with the famous, scalding lines

There 's a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I 'm through.

Plath 's view of her relationship with Ted is revealed more fully in her poem "The Rabbit Catcher." It recounts a walk they once took when Sylvia discovered some rabbit traps beside the trail and became enraged at them. The atmosphere of this poem is calculated to convey the feeling of being trapped. Even the air and the sea have a rabbit trap effect on Sylvia:

It was a place of force--

The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,

Tearing off my voice, and the sea

Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead

Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

Shrieking at the traps, Plath realizes how similar the rabbit 's fate is to her own. There is a trap set for her as well, that of housewifery and an overbearing marriage:

I felt a still busyness, an intent.

I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,

Ringing the white china.

How they awaited him, those little deaths!

They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.

And we, too, had a relationship--

Tight wires between us,

Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring

Sliding shut on some quick thing,

The constriction killing me also.

Written in 1962, Plath was aware of Ted 's infidelities while composing these lines. They become yet another fatal rabbit trap waiting to snap down on Sylvia, waiting in the same manner as Ted 's "sweethearts." The relationship itself is made to be a rabbit trap--their love is so strong, tight, and controlling as to choke her to death and too deep rooted to bring to an end.

A more underlying inspiration for her poetry, and, indeed, most of the tasks she pursued throughout her life, is perfectionism. Even as a teenager, she obsessed over living up to others ' expectations of her. At the age of seventeen, she wrote in her journal,

I have erected in my mind an image of myself--idealistic and beautiful. Is not that image, free from blemish, the true self--the true perfection? Am I wrong when this image insinuates itself between me and the merciless mirror? ... Never, never will I reach the perfection I long for with all my soul--my paintings, my poems, my stories--all poor, poor reflections (Letters Home 40).

The psychiatrists at McLean Hospital who examined Plath after her first suicide attempt blamed perfectionism for her breakdown over any illness or imbalance known at the time. Mrs. Olive Prouty, Sylvia 's benefactress and mentor, wrote to Aurelia Plath that the doctors had found no traces of psychoses but "suggested that she is a perfectionist, which accounts for her self-depreciation if she falls short of perfection in anything she does" (Letters Home 128).

Some of this perfectionist sentiment may be expressed in her poem "The Colossus." It is a poem written to an old, broken statue which she attempts to repair. The speaker does address it at one point as "O father," but critics such as Margaret Dickie point out that

Perhaps the colossus is not the actual father but the creative father, a suggestion reinforced by the fact that the spirit of the Ouija board from which Plath and Hughes received hints of subjects for poems claimed that his family god, Kolossus, gave him most of his information. The colossus, then, may be Plath 's private god of poetry, the muse which she would have to make masculine in order to worship and marry (Ford, On The Colossus).

The poem, then, takes on a greatly different meaning, expressing the speaker 's feeling of unworthiness and incompleteness, even from the first lines:

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, glued, and properly joined.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt, and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It 's worse than a barnyard.

Try as she may, the speaker 's attempts at poetry emerge as the horrible racket of barn animals rather than the beautiful art she longs to create. "Thirty years now I have labored/ To dredge the silt from your throat./ I am none the wiser."

The second stanza portrays the speaker carrying buckets of repair materials up ladders onto the figure 's giant form. "I crawl like an ant in mourning," the speaker says, small and insignificant, "Over the weedy acres of your brow." In the final stanza, the speaker seems to resign to her unworthiness: "My hours are married to shadow," rather than to the poetry god, whom she longs for.

Sylvia 's perfectionism "drove her to succeed at the same time that it insured failure, breeding a kind of destructive energy which was to become increasingly evident in her writing" (Barnard 16). One of Plath 's earlier poems in which this focus on self destruction seems evident is "The Arrival of the Bee Box." Sylvia 's father was an expert in entomology, particularly on bees, and Sylvia sometimes assisted him in his beekeeping in the backyard. Later, she would incorporate beekeeping into many of her poems and take on the hobby herself in later life (Barnard 14). This poem recounts the delivery of her first box of bees.

The coffin allusion in the poem 's first line, "I ordered this, clean wood box," and the first lines of the second stanza, "The box is locked, it is dangerous./ I have to live with it overnight," present the bee box as Pandora 's Box. Inside, it is too dark to watch the bees and they speak in a language she does not understand: "I put my eye to the grid./ It is dark, dark"... "I lay my ear to furious Latin./ I am not Caesar." The bees are presented as a malignant force not to be unleashed on the world.

But, despite the danger, Sylvia "can 't keep away from it," and toys with thoughts about setting the bees free: "I am no source of honey/ So why should they turn on me?" At the end of the poem, the speaker resolves to let out of the box those things that frighten and will possibly destroy her: "Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free./ The box is only temporary."

Doubtlessly, the most prevalent theme in Plath 's work is that of Death as a gentle and romantic persona. The poet 's own suicide, in a way, confirmed her outlook, adding a sense of sincerity and perhaps tragedy to her poetry. "Lady Lazarus" is the foremost example of the poet 's unique view of death.

Central to this poem is the Biblical story of Jesus and Lazarus found in John 11. Lazarus was a personal friend of Jesus who died while his family waited for Jesus to arrive, who had promised Lazarus 's illness would not end in death. When Jesus arrived at the house, Lazarus had already been dead four days. Jesus resurrects Lazarus, calling him forth from the tomb. Plath follows the wording of the King James Version closely, advising her doctors to "Peel off the napkin" and "unwrap me hand and foot," as John 11:44 states, "And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave clothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin."

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is already dead, stating simply, "I have done it again." The speaker insists that dying is her "art," which she does "exceptionally well," and that the only difficult thing about it is coming back each time to the amusement of the "peanut-crunching crowd" that presses in to see the "big strip tease" of her resurrection:

It 's easy enough to do it in a cell.

It 's easy enough to do it and stay put.

It 's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

'A miracle! '

That knocks me out.

The speaker insists that her doctors raise her from the dead for the same reason Jesus did Lazarus--to glorify themselves to the growing crowd outside the tomb. She becomes their art form, destroying hers in the process. At the beginning of the poem, while she is still dead, the speaker addresses her doctor as "O my enemy," and at the end the doctors even become Nazi torturers:

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable.

Writing in a letter not long after recovering from her first suicide attempt, she describes her overwhelming "hatred toward the people who would not let me die, but insisted rather in dragging me back into the hell of sordid and meaningless existence" (Letters Home 131).

Throughout the poem, death is portrayed as an improvement and a hopeful act. After her first suicide attempt, they had to pick worms off her body "like sticky pearls," suggesting beauty and improvement. And there is a feeling of terror pervading the second half directed at the doctors who torture her:

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart--

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes,

The terror builds up, finally culminating in the terrifying final lines

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

In death, the poet is perfected and made powerful. Sylvia Plath has the distinction of being one of the only poets to write optimistically of suicide.

Sylvia Plath often portrays Death as possessing a dual personality. Her early poem "Two Views of a Cadaver Room" presents the first as ugly, destructive, and sickening, while the second is affected by and considerate of human love. In the first view of the cadaver room, four men are laid out "black as burnt turkey." "Already half unstrung./ A vinegary fume/ Of the death vats clung to them."

The head of this cadaver had caved in,

And she could scarcely make out anything

In that rubble of skull plates and old leather.

A sallow piece of string held it together.

This gruesome image is contrasted drastically with the second scene, which portrays two lovers oblivious to the death around them. They sing and play music to each other,

He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin

Skirts, sings in the direction

Of her bare shoulder, while she bends,

Fingering a leaflet of music, over him,

Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands

Of the death 's head shadowing their song.

These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long.

Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country

Foolish, delicate, in the lower right-hand corner.

These lovers ' happiness will fade away soon, but, even if for an instant, their love halts the eternal advance of the entire "carrion army."

Plath explores the idea of Death 's dualism further in her later poem "Death & Co.," this time with the use of personification. "Two, of course there are two," the poet says of Death 's personality. The first is portrayed as a scalded and verdigris-green, naked vulture. He hunts the speaker, clapping at her with his beak and playing on her perfectionism: "He tells me how badly I photograph." He is a dark and evil predator, one who "does not smile or smoke."

"The other does that/ His hair long and plausive." He is portrayed as friendly and lonely, someone who "wants to be loved." The poem 's last stanza,

I do not stir.

The frost makes a flower,

The dew makes a star,

The dead bell,

The dead bell.

Somebody 's done for,

seems to suggest that death is an improvement.

That death improves or perfects a person is a theme prevalent in many of Plath 's poems. In "Edge," one of final poems written before her untimely death, Plath looks on at the body of a recent suicide. The opening lines make her sentiment very clear: "The woman is perfected./ Her dead/ Body wears the smile of accomplishment." In startling yet beautiful imagery, she describes how her two dead children rest on their mother 's body:

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,

One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.

She has folded

Them back into her body as petals

Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed

From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

"The moon," an observer in many of Sylvia Plath 's poems, "has nothing to be sad about,/ Staring from her hood of bone./ She is used to this sort of thing."

Sylvia Plath 's legacy on modern poetry is deep and long lasting, but hard to define. "In many ways, Sylvia as a poet defies categorization. She has been variously described as a lyricist, a confessionalist, a symbolist, an imagist, and a mere diarist... All of these terms aptly describe the various modes of discourse that work effectively in her poetry" (Giles 2223). In 1958, while teaching English at Smith College, Plath took a poetry class at Boston University taught by Robert Lowell (Barnard 20), a prominent Confessionalist writer. Most consider her a member of the Confessionalist school, the group of individual poets who looked toward their own personal experiences and emotions for the inspiration and, more importantly, subjects of their poetry (Giles 2224). Sylvia Plath was almost always her own subject.

In "Zoo Keeper 's Wife," for example, Plath examines her relationship with Ted Hughes. She conjures wild symbols of grotesque animals to describe her attraction to him:

You wooed me with the wolf-headed fruit bats

Hanging from their scorched hooks in the moist

Fug of the Small Mammal House.

The armadillo dozed in his sandbin

Obscene and bald as a pig, the white mice

Multiplied to infinity like angels on a pinhead

Out of sheer boredom. Tangled in the sweat-wet sheets

I remember the bloodied chicks and the quartered rabbits.

Other images stand out as well, such as "the bear-furred, bird-eating spider/ Clambering round its glass box like an eight fingered hand." Plath seems to be coming to understand the pathological origin of her attraction.

The poem ends with a depiction of the poet awake at night, sleepless while she considers the nature of her relationship with her husband: "Nightly now I flog apes owls bears sheep/ Over their iron stile. And still don 't sleep."

Many have come to relate to Sylvia Plath 's distinct voice and unique poetic niche.
Feminists point to her troubled relationships with her father and her husband, finding in her the woman oppressed on all sides by man. Scores of troubled young men and women battling depression have found a role model in Plath, a person who fought a valiantly against overwhelming odds, and her poetry, describing and putting to words the pain so many have felt themselves, has doubtlessly saved countless lives. General audiences, even those who lack knowledge of her biography and understand few of the symbols, are struck by the massive amounts of emotion Sylvia Plath infused in her
poetry.

Suicide has a peculiar tendency of making legends of the most tragic of those who embrace it, and Sylvia Plath can certainly be said to be one of these. She was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for her Collected Poems (Ford, Two Views), securing her place as a great American poet. Her work has influenced many of the greats of the last two generations, and her influence on poetry and the poets who craft it will continue well into the future. The story she left behind, the true story of true, passionate, crushing love, is as timeless as any novelist 's greatest work, and perhaps will become as immortal as her poetry.

WORKS CITED:

Barnard, Caroline King. Twayne 's United States Authors Series: Sylvia Plath. 1st Edition. Warren French, editor, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

Ford, Karen. "On 'Daddy '," University of Illinois Department of English, 2000, , 15 May 2005.

---. "On 'The Colossus '," University of Illinois Department of English, 2000, , 15 May 2005.

---. "Two Views on Sylvia Plath 's Life and Career," University of Illinois Department of English, 2000, , 15 May 2005.

Giles, Richard F. "Sylvia Plath," Critical Survey of Poetry. Volume 5. Frank M. Magill, editor. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1982, pp 2220-2231.

Hilton, Nelson. "Lexis Complexes," University of Georgia Press, 1995, , 22 May 2005.

Plath, Sylvia. "Arrival of the Bee Box, The," PlathOnline.com, 2003, , 17 May 2005.

---. "Colossus, The," PlathOnline.com, 2003, , 17 May 2005.

---. "Daddy," PlathOnline.com, 2003, , 17 May 2005.

---. "Death & Co.," PlathOnline.com, 2003, , 17 May 2005.

---. "Edge," PlathOnline.com, 2003, , 17 May 2005.

---. "Lady Lazarus," PlathOnline.com, 2003, , 17 May 2005.

---. Letters Home. Aurelia Schrober Plath, editor. New York: Harper Perennial, 1975.

---. "Rabbit Catcher, The," PlathOnline.com, 2003, , 17 May 2005.

---. "Two Views of a Cadaver Room," PlathOnline.com, 2003, , 17 May 2005.

---. "Zoo Keeper 's Wife," PlathOnline.com, 2003, , 17 May 2005.

Schultz, William Todd, "The Prototypical Scene: A Method for Generating Psychobiographical Hypotheses," William Todd Schultz, 2002, , 21 May 2005.