Sylvia Plath: tady Lazarus Meets the Bell Jar (1932-1963)

Chelsea Bowles, OP Contributor

The End

“The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment”

These are the first three lines of American
poet Sylvia Plath’s last poem, the eerily
morbid “Edge,” published in Arie/ after
her death.

In the last few months of het life, writ-
ing under emotional strain and
depression, and chilled from one of the
coldest London winters on record, Plath
had a creative frenzy that resulted in over
40 poems, most published in Arie/, her
most famous book of poetry. At the age
of 30, Plath slipped into a downward spi-
ral of depression that she could not
overcome.

Plath tried to endure the freezing
pipes, modest heat, and the cold, lonely
fact that she wouldn’t be reconciling with
her husband, British poet Ted Hughes,
who left her for a married woman, Assia
Wevill. That winter, Plath continued to
write her poems and short stories, yet
found little happiness, even though her
first and only novel, The Be// Jar was pub-
lished in the UK on January 14 under the
pseudonym Victoria Lucas (Plath was
worried about the literary value of her
loosely autobiographical book). She wrote
until the last six days of her life, and then
the spark within her died.

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath
committed suicide in her London flat. She
prepared food for her two young children
before opening their bedroom window
and sealing off their room with towels
and tape. She then sealed herself in the
kitchen, turned on the gas stove and soon
died of carbon-monoxide poisoning,

Her suicide was well thought out and
well executed. Though no suicide note is
known, she did leave a note for the tenant
downstairs, Trevor Thomas, to “Call Dr.
Horder.” Unfortunately, Thomas passed
out from gas fumes that leaked into his
apartment and he didn’t wake at his usual
8am. The nanny arrived at 9am and could-
nt get into Plath’s flat. Perhaps Plath
wanted these people to find her before
she succumbed to the carbon monoxide,
perhaps she was only crying out for help
ot her husband’s attention.

It wasn’t until after her death that her
poetry gained the attention and recogni-
tion it deserved. In 1965, Arie/, her second
book of poetry, was published posthu-

FEBRUARY 23/2005

mously in the UK. Are/ and The Bell Jar
are her most popular works.

The Doomed Beginning
Sylvia Plath had her first story published
in Seventeen magazine in August 1950. In
1952 she won Mademoiselle magazine’s
Women’s College Fiction contest with a
short story (“Sunday at the Mintons”),
which can be found in her short-story col-
lection, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
(1977).

As winner of Mademoiselle’s College
Board contest, Plath was able to spend

breakdown. Just as in The Bel/ Jar, Plath
took sleeping pills and was found three
days later under the house by her brother.
This was also the same month that Plath,
as Guest Managing Editor, introduced the
issue of Mademoiselle, the issue that fea-
tured her famous villanelle, “Mad Girl’s
Love Song.” Also that summer, Harper’
Magazine paid for three of her poems. Her
creative and financial success was met by
“a time of darkness, despair, disillusion-
ment—so black only as the inferno of the
human mind can be—symbolic death,
and numb shock—then the painful agony
of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration.”

 

June, 1953, in New York as guest editor of
the magazine. This internship sparked the
idea for The Bell Jar. There are many simi-
larities between the novel and Plath’s life,
from the internship with a fashion maga-
zine to having a benefactress (in Plath’s
case, it was novelist Olive Higgins
Prouty), to a suicide attempt after return-
ing to Massachusetts.

In August 1953, Plath attempted sui-
cide for the first time and had a nervous

With electroshock therapy and psy-
chotherapy, Plath was able to get better
and graduate Smith College in 1955 with
honours. That fall she started at
Newnham College at Cambridge
University after winning the Fulbright
Scholarship. It was there, in early 1956,
that she met British poet Ted Hughes.
They were immediately drawn to each
other—intellectually and physically. By
June they were married and living in near

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poverty as Plath helped Hughes type and
send off his poetry manuscripts. Plath’s
love for her husband eclipsed her own
writing goals.

In 1957, the couple moved to the
States so that Plath could teach at Smith
College. After the school year, Plath quit
teaching to work on her writing. In 1959,
Plath took a poetry class with Robert
Lowell at Boston University and “assimi-
lated the doctrines of The Confessional
Poets” (personal experiences explored in
verse). This greatly influenced Plath,
bringing shape to her already autobio-
graphic and symbolic prose.

In December of 1959, Plath and
Hughes moved back to London. Early
1960 was a time of anticipation for Plath;
she learned that her first book of poetry,
Colossus, was to be published in October,
and on April 1 she gave birth to her first
child, Frieda.

By early 1961, Plath was in poor health
and had suffered a miscarriage.
Motherhood left her little time to write,
but it’s rumoured that she began working
on The Bell Jar. In late summer the couple
moved to the countryside (Devon), and
rented their London flat to Canadian poet
David Wevill and his exotic wife, Assia.
They all became friends, though as time
wore on, Plath became paranoid about
her flirtatious husband and the beautiful
Assia.

But Plath had some distractions from
her fears. She won a $2,000 Saxton Grant
to work on The Bell Jar that fall, and on
January 17, 1962, she gave birth to
Nicholas. Sometime after her son’s birth,
she drove her car off the road in what she
later called a suicide attempt. A few
months after this attempt, Hughes and
Assia started their affair, while Plath
worked on her novel. In July, Plath
learned of the affair, but she didn’t kick
Hughes out of the house until September.
Instead of sinking into depression, Plath
began to write poetry prolifically. It wasn’t
until Christmas that Plath missed Hughes
and wanted to reconcile. When she
learned of Hughes’s commitment to his
pregnant lover, the darkness crept in. In
just over a month she would give in to her
suicidal tendencies.

“Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.”

(“Lady Lazarus”) — Sylvia Plath

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