“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Most people are surprised to learn that Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite writers. “But you’re so happy! How could you have so much joy and read such pain?” Well, firstly because I am not one dimensional. I can have other feelings other than joy and happiness. Also, because I, like most young adults, had times of depression and can relate to Plath’s writings. My depression was nowhere near as severe as Plath’s, but I can feel a sort of kinship with her when I read her words. “The Bell Jar” is in the top three list of my favorite novels, a coming of age story that is autobiographical. After reading Daddy and Lady Lazarus I realized that they are also autobiographical. Plath was a suicidal woman and attempted to take her life many times, and in Lady Lazarus, Plath likens herself to a cat with nine lives on her third life. Plath attempted a pill overdose in her twenties, climbing under her mothers porch in a pill induced coma for three days, later writing that she “blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion”. She was given psychiatric care for the next six months, where they treated her with receiving electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Dr. Ruth Beuscher. She continued on withe her life, “Out of the ash I rise” (p2604) and was able to avoid the temptation of suicide. In the end, though, she succumbed and killed herself by shutting her head in her cooking oven.
Another thing that I thought of when I was reading Plath, was the book The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, or the movie by Sofia Coppola. The Virgin Suicides has these Plath-like romantic and noble suicides and I wonder if Eugenides was influenced by Plath… Plath is such an iconic feminist writer, I am sure to a certain extent she influenced most of our modern writers today.
Florence + the Machine – Never Let Me Go
This song by Florence + the Machine really captures the spirit of Plath, the depression, the idea of hope and the final destruction.
Michal's Blog for ENGL244 