Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

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Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Author Sylvia Plath's association with death and madness stemmed from her confessional poetry, her novel The Bell Jar, and the facts of her life, but most of all from the cult of readers—many of them teenage girls—that formed after her suicide. Plath's stormy marriage to poet Ted Hughes was a matter for the literary tabloids, and her work was taken up by scholars as evidence of a troubled soul oppressed by sexist times. Her poems—most particularly those published posthumously in Ariel —are an enduring proof of her very real talent.

Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Her father, a college professor and expert on bees, died when she was eight. She was a good student, and published her first short story in the magazine Seventeen when she was just a teenager.

In 1950, Plath entered Smith College on a scholarship. She already had an impressive list of publications, and while at Smith she wrote over four hundred poems. She spent some time in New York as a "guest editor" at Mademoiselle ; when she returned home, she attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. Afterward, she received electroshock and psychotherapy in a mental hospital. (Plath used much of this experience for her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published pseudonymously in England in 1963 under the name Victoria Lucas. Plath's mother, Aurelia, fought against American publication; the book was not published in the United States until 1970.)

Plath graduated from Smith in 1955 and won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England, where she met poet Ted Hughes. The story of their tempestuous first meeting is now mythic in literary circles: he stole her hair band; she bit his cheek. They were married in 1956.

In June of 1957, Plath attended Robert Lowell's poetry class at Boston University, where she met the poet Anne Sexton; the three of them would later be considered the foci of the intensely personal "confessional school" of poetry. In 1959, Plath and Hughes moved to England. The following year, when she was 28, her first book of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published.

Plath and Hughes separated later that year, when Hughes left Plath for another woman. Plath spent that winter with their two children, Frieda and Nicholas, in a small London flat, waking up at four a.m. in order to write before the children arose. This was a very productive period for her; she wrote almost a poem a day. On February 11, 1963, just days after the publication of The Bell Jar, Plath killed herself with kitchen gas.

Ted Hughes became Plath's literary executor. He brought her collection of poetry, Ariel, to publication in 1965. Among the "scorching" poems in Ariel is Plath's most famous poem, "Daddy," along with "Death and Co." and "Lady Lazarus" ("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"). Other posthumous publications included Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, and, in 1981, The Collected Poems, edited by Hughes, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

For feminist scholars, Plath was a talented, brilliant woman done wrong by men and the times. If she had lived in a later era, they ask, would her story have unfolded the same way? Was she a victim of the 1950s ideal of woman as housewife and mother, wedged into a domestic role inappropriate for someone with her skills? Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are usually mentioned in the same literary breath—both were women, confessional poets, and suicides; Sexton's poem "Sylvia's Death" discusses their mutual preoccupation with the subjects of death and desire.

After her death, Plath achieved iconic status as a "madwoman" poet. For some cultural critics, she was the epitome of the silenced woman. Hughes had total control over her literary estate, and may have exerted that control to protect his own image; he destroyed at least one journal and censored many other pieces. Many Plath fans had a deep hatred for Hughes, and called him a betrayer, even a murderer. Although her gravestone was inscribed "Sylvia Plath Hughes," it has been repeatedly defaced to read just "Sylvia Plath."

Years after her death, Plath remained a literary presence. In 1996, About Sylvia: Poems was published, containing works by Diane Ackerman, John Berryman, Rachel Hadas, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Richard Wilbur. Ted Hughes, British poet laureate, broke his silence on Plath soon before his own death in 1998 with the publication of Birthday Letters, a collection of poems about their relationship.

—Jessy Randall