Shawnee McDaniel's List: Sylvia Plath

• • Plath got her title The Bell Jar from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
• • "Yet the source for Plath's title, The Bell Jar, may be in Holmes [Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes]; and the physician diagnosed the illness that Plath embodied in her life and in her novel."
• • The bell jar is just one of the problems Esther Greenwood faces-her depression, women's roles, her wanting to die.

  • "Basically, the bell jar is a capacious symbol at the core of an image cluster involving several enclosing, usually air-tight, and always debilitating containers, which include wombs, uteruses, and coffins, as well as bell jars."
• • The bell jar is punishment for rebels.

  • "The bell jar symbolizes "scientific" (and therefore supposedly fair and objective) "punishment" (disguised as experiment) for non-conformists."
• • Esther's setting adds to her depression.

  • "Esther cannot survive in the fiercely competitive atmosphere of New York because of her own highly sensitive nature."

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• • In The Bell Jar, Plath was describing the McLean Hospital which was an insane asylum.
• For all three poets sojourns at McLean provided not only needed respites but also  creative material. Madness came out of the closet in  their writings, and even acquired a certain cachet.

  • Mental institutions gave authors inspiration for their works.
• When Plath first arrived Barnhouse decided to supplement  psychotherapy with insulin-shock treatment, which not only failed to address the  patient's apathy but caused her face to bloat up and bruise, spoiling her  natural beauty and compounding her crisis of self-doubt.

  • self-doubt could have been Plath's worst problem
• • So Plath had a bad run with electroshock therapy then she had a good run which helped her.

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• Plath's continued popularity can be chalked up to both the  emotional immediacy of her confessional poems, and a biography that careens from  apple-cheeked sorority sister to suicide at age 30.  

  • Plath remains popular because of her "good girl gone bad" and her emotional writing
• Todd Schultz, a professor of psychology at Pacific University  in Forest Grove, Oregon, who has written extensively on Sylvia Plath, believes  that "supersensitive" young women may find Plath liberating because she attempts  to resist traditional female roles, all the while struggling against her  ingrained perfectionism.

  • Teens relate to it because they identify with rebellious women (Alice in Wonderland)

• • Every single author of any article has chosen a side on Sylvia Plath-she's either a selfish brat who left behind some kids and screwed her ex-husband or she's the depressed victim whose husband sent her to her grave.
• For it dwells on the person who wrote, not the writing; on  the hands that turned on the gas jet, not the hands that touched a manual  typewriter.

  • Too much focus on how Plath died instead of what she did while she lived
• The Unabridged Journals are a writer's diary, and above all  else, Plath the person is a writer. The journals do  what those of a major writer do. They trace her  evolution as a writer.

  • Point of The Unabridged Journals: to track Plath's progress
• Finally, these journals are the first drafts of literature,  many of them of flair and power; the early translations of experience and  perception into writing; the laboratory of a maturing creativity; the matrix of  ideas, themes, characters, metaphors, and the historical and cosmic patterns she  wanted to seize from the flux of daily life.

  • The Unabridged Journals show the inspiration for Plath's poetry.
• One of his many attractions is her conviction that his genius is so big that he  will not fear her talents and will be her male muse.

  • She wants an equal in her marriage.

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• One of the less expected motifs of Sylvia Plath's journals is  her intense and abiding appreciation of food.

  • uses food to remind her of comfort and most likely survival
• In the strange, private symbolism of the journals, preparing and eating food,  along with various other banal rituals of domestic life, represent rare and  valuable moments of escape from herself

  • these actions require no thought so she loves them
• "I long to permeate the matter of this world," she writes at  the age of twenty-three, "to become anchored to life by laundry and lilacs,  daily bread and fried eggs and a man, the dark-eyed stranger who eats my food  and my body and my love and goes around the world all day and comes back to find  solace with me at night."

  • she does want the stereotypical woman role-society tells her its the right thing and its the easiest thing
• When I was 'happy' domestically I felt a gag in my  throat. Now that my domestic life.... is chaos, I am ... producing free stuff I had locked in me  for years."

  • She was creatively her best when her domestic life was the worst
• The relative calm of married life may indeed have blocked or  gagged Plath's poetic gift; but, as she repeatedly attests in the journals, it  also helped to keep her alive.

  • the boring, happy life diminished her creativity, but she was overwhelmed when her creativity flowed
• In the end, the journals do not depict a put-upon housewife  struggling to free herself from the yoke of her husband or from the burden of  "false consciousness." The woman who emerges in these  pages is someone who recognizes the perilous interconnectedness of her creative  and suicidal drives, and shrewdly pursues conventional domestic happiness--or  "sunny facades"-- as a means of tethering herself to sanity.

  • could be why so many creative people kill themselves

  • In the end, she wasn't unhappy with her domestic roles, she understands that her creativity and suicidal thoughts work together
• Poems are all very well, she tells herself, but it is stories--stories about  "other people"--that represent the apex of writerly achievement

  • Books get all the glory-not poems
    still true today
• Plath was a fanatical self-improver, who filled her journals  with stern injunctions to do better, get up earlier, study harder, "work on her  femininity," learn German, French, horseback riding, and put more philosophy  into her poems so as not to "lag behind Adrienne Rich."

  • Probably also led to her downfall-strive to be perfect
• • To me, Plath's greatest problem was that nothing was good enough.
• She pores over other people's fiction for tips, wonders  hopefully whether having children will "humanize" her.  In 1959, when she gets a part-time job typing patient records at a psychiatric  clinic in Boston, she is briefly optimistic that exposure to all those case  histories will "deepen and enrich" her understanding of people.

  • if plath did become human-she would find all her faults which would lead to her downfall

  • she wants to be closer to her audience-feels like she isn't a human-but she knows that being human is what the reader relates to
• The Bell Jar is just "a potboiler" after all, and besides it  is all about her. "Always myself, myself," she  laments.

  • She doesn't think The Bell Jar was good enough-strives for perfection-but the reader doesn't want perfection

• Here, for the first time, are the  luridly matricidal meditations inspired by Plath's therapy sessions with the  psychiatrist Ruth Buescher in the late 1950s:

        So how do I express my hatred for my mother? In my deepest       emotions I think of her as an enemy: someboday who "killed"       my father, my first male ally in the world. She is a       murderess of maleness. What to do with her, with the       hostility, undying, which I feel for her? I want, as ever,       to grab my life out from under her hot itchy hands....       She's a killer. Watch Out. She's deadly as a cobra under       that shiny greengold hood.... I'll have my own husband,       thank you. You won't kill him the way you killed my father.       He has a soul, he has sex strong as it comes. He isn't       going to die so soon. So keep out. Your breath stinks       worse than Undertaker's Basement when it comes to trying to       rear a soul in its perfect freedom. 

  • Plath just sounds like a brat when you hear the whole story. It's not what society wants.

  • Sounds like she's describing herself.
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  • • This is why Ted Hughes burned the journals and why he changed the poetry.
• Officially, it seems, Plath's journals are valued for what  they tell us about the poetry and the processes that brought it into  being.

  • Describes importance of journals
• • I'm pretty sure the author of this article is completely insulting Plath's poetry and personal diary.

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• The allure wasn't just the poems; it was the story behind the poems.

  • Her popularity was from her backround story-not the poems themselves.
• She killed herself the same year that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was  published, and with the publication of her own copious journals and  letters--detailing every injury to her psyche--immediately became feminism's  poster girl.

  • Sylvia Plath has come to represent the fight for women's choices in life. Seen in The Bell Jar.
• All this made him an irresistible target; in indicting Hughes, feminist literary  critics made much of the rack-and-screw imagery.

  • Hughes came to represent all men so feminists had a straightforward target to hate and fight against.
• we're in what you could call a second age of Plath criticism. Where the first  was characterized by stridency, anger, and the impulse to build Plath up, this  one is characterized by the impulse to cut down to size and humanize an  over-mythified icon.

  • In present time, instead of rallying to the call, people try to identify with Plath and figure out exactly why she killed herself (usually leads to the answer of depression).
• When one understands that the subject of the poem is, indeed, this notion of  being "at one," the word "suicidal" is cast in a different light--as the  shedding of the self, the "sui" that is no longer of paramount importance.

  • Suicidal changes meaning and importance in Sylvia Plath's poetry.
• Ariel is a throwing off of decorum--thematically and formally. Gone are the  studious applications of poetic practice; in their place is a new voice, one  that was willing to be rude, ironic, sexual, and aggressive--all things that  Plath's 1950s girlhood in Wellesley had encouraged her to avoid.

  • Plath does not follow society in Ariel, she shows a not societally appropriate woman who has an honest voice.
• Unsurprisingly, Sylvia, caught up in the poet's glooms, fails to consider the  fact that Plath was among the first really good American poets to take  motherhood as her subject.

  • The movie follows what society wants, not the whole truth. And does not give Sylvia Plath all of her justices and struggles she overcame.
• it seems to be something about the poems' naked ambition--their willingness to  flout boundaries and to hold up a new set of preoccupations (motherhood; the  crucible of an unstable self) as valid--that displeases.

  • Only after Sylvia's death did people understand.

  • While Sylvia Plath was alive, her writing was too provocative and it was not in agreement with society so it displeased many people.
• But it's the grotesquerie of Plath's imagination that may be responsible for the  continuing ambivalence about her. Morbidity is an un-American quality.

  • Part of Sylvia Plath's audience did not react well to her writing because of her morbid tone, style, and stories.
• Our literature of disaffection tends to be the literature of melancholia: when  that melancholia verges on anger (as in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, to  which The Bell Jar bears comparison), that anger is usually rooted in a critique  of the social status quo.

  • It's hard to rebel against society and this article is saying that most ideas that rebel are morbid also.
• But Plath's grotesquerie goes hand in hand with a sense of sublimity that's  easily overlooked.

  • Part of the audience sees the bad and misses the good of Sylvia Plath's writing.

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• In the passage, the poet is describing her father in the  ugliest possible manner. She calls him "Ghastly  statue" with a toe as big as a "Frisco seal." Clearly,  by the word "Frisco" she means "Friesian or Frisian" because a Frisian seal,  like a Frisian bull or cow, is abnormally heavy.

  • Sylvia Plath is insulting her father through her diction.
• But Sylvia Plath prefers using the older name of the place,  presumably because she wants to recall through the older name the historical  event of 1620, the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at the tip of Cape Cod called  Provincetown, analogous to her father's supposed landing at the same place in  1900, at the age of fifteen.

  • Uses the word "Nauset" (line 13) to reference her father's arrival in America.
• The poet describes him as a ghastly statue with a toe that is  grey in color and as big as a Frisco seal, alluding to her father's gangrenous,  swollen toe and to his German origin, Friesland being Low Germany.

  • Why the reader knows that Sylvia Plath is talking about her actual "Daddy".
• By describing her father as a statue with a head pouring bean  green over blue, the poet calls our attention to the later life of her father,  when he became a professor of biology with a special interest in bees at the  University of Boston and wrote Bumblebees and Their Ways.

  • Reference to real father.
• She knew that, as compared to other oceans, the Atlantic is  very unpredictable. Sometimes it is very turbulent,  but at other times, quite strangely, it is very, very gentle. The epithet "freakish" is thus a faithful characterization of the  Atlantic, symbolic of Sylvia Plath's  own attitude toward her father, now hostile, now friendly.

  • Explains why Sylvia compared her father to the Atlantic Ocean.

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• • Discusses Sylvia Plath's style in "Daddy". How she creates speed and slows the reader down.
• She also does this by using enjambment to diffuse some of the  force of the masculine rhymes that end the majority of her stanzas.

  • Plath uses techniques that include rhyming.
• another stylistic pattern that recurs in  "Daddy" is the compulsive use of the  /oo/ sound that inevitably draws the reader back to the you and do rhymes of the  first line.

  • uses "oo" sound repeatedly throughout "Daddy"
• Susan R. Van Dyne considers this "verbal  tic" to be a sign "of a disordered psyche and poetic incontinence," an  "overdetermined" use of "regressive and repetitive language."[ 2] Similarly, Steven Gould Axelrod regards  the repetition as childlike

  • Susan R. Van Dyne and Steven Gould Axelrod think she used the "oo" as a kind of accident because she was depressed.
• A. Alvarez considers the style of  Plath's poem to be "a form of manic  defense"

  • Plath's style is formed to help Plath with her therapy that she gets from writing.
• Although the plosive force of  Plath's invectives against the father  (and her husband) emphasize the speaker's strong desire to be psychologically  free of the introjected "daddy," the  echoing /oo/ sounds that permeate the poem imply her paradoxical need still to  "get back, back, back to you" (line 59)--a sign of an incomplete, though  desired, end to mourning.

  • Plath contradicting herself-wants to be free of Daddy but craves his prescence.
• A final stylistic way in which the speaker attempts to  extricate herself from her father's psychological hold on her without completely  annihilating the part of him she still loves and misses is by creating a  delicate balance between pronouns that separate his identity from hers.

  • Her style reflects her psychology.
• the repeated "I" pronouns still signify a heroic attempt at psychic  reintegration--of being glued back together--without others controlling the  shape that identity takes.

  • Trying to find her own identity.
• Moreover, in the last stanzas of the poem (14-16), the  speaker, atypically, uses the contractions "I'm" and "I've" four times,  suggesting a verbal effort to fuse the "I am" and the "I have" in resistance to  the father's formerly controlling "you were" and "you did."   

  • Pushing her father away-using diction to show the effort she is making.
• Finally, in the last line of the poem, when the speaker calls her father a  "bastard," she is not only cursing him, but trying to make his hold on her  history, personality, identity, and destiny illegitimate

  • By calling Daddy a bastard, she is disowning him.
• Ending, however, with the /oo/ sound in "through," the poem  simultaneously proclaims and resists closure--a partial psychological victory,  at best, of the self over the other.

  • When Sylvia Plath ends with "through", she should be closing completely-why would this word still keep the relationship alive? "Through" proclaims that we're done.
• the speaker in Plath's "Daddy," her memories  of alleged victimization echoing in every broken and repeated nursery-sounding  rhyme, can achieve only a partial victory over the "man who / Bit my pretty red  heart in two" (55-56).

  • The damage has been done, it can't be taken back.

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• Plath's popularity has not been limited  to a cultural moment  or to the way her suicide was turned  into publicity. Her significance emerges from her  vitality as an artist. In her poems  a sensuous, explosive inner life  mattered.

  • Article thinks Plath is popular because of her talent and skill, not her death.
• and it is unlikely that the restored version will put  to rest some readers' wish  to possess an iconic image of the  author as if her manipulation of metaphor became reportage about her domestic  situation.

  • Readers want to think of Plath as a tragic woman who was deeply troubled by her depression. They also want her to be a mystery because people love mysteries.
• Written in the last weeks of her life, they are marked by an abstract, chilling  certainty.

  • Since Plath finished her book of collected poems, she didn't have anything to live for anymore.
• From the distance of the 21st century, Lowell's remarks seem  like a dazzling fantasia on nihilism  as he argues that the poems "tell that life, even when disciplined, is simply  not worth it." The restored edition, with its  narrative are aimed toward spring and renewal, suggests no such thing.

  • The two manuscripts differ in the meaning of the poems. One says it's not worth it to live, while the other has a more satisfied ending.
• And yet ultimately the publication of Plath's original  manuscript shows us its author as a  consciously evolving artist who arranged her poems  to tell the story of  a journey through  a psychic crisis  to a vision of  appetite and release.

  • Describes the point of Ariel.

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• The hero does not aim to  please. The hero confronts and resists. The hero is fearless: power and agency  are her attributes.

  • Calling Sylvia Plath a hero because she was not a complacent wife- she did not just accept her fate of being domestic and sacrificing her hobbies for it.
• Few consider the connection between the poetic influences  that shaped Plath's style and the personal dilemma that became her subject … few  speculate on what it meant to be a woman born in America in 1932, reading and  trying to write major poetry

  • Discusses the feminist side of Plath
• Perhaps for Plath the allure of the domestic was due to the  repose it offered: the repose of persona, of wearing a  mask.

  • The easy route of life was tempting to Sylvia Plath. Would be tempting to everyone.

  • Could be an age thing also.
• "If I were a man, I could write a novel about this," Plath  laments, embroiled in yet another pre-Hughes love affair. "Being a woman, why must I only cry and freeze, cry and  freeze?"(

  • It was easier for a man during that time- makes Plath's success even greater.
• by 1959 the poems are sure: if  domestic perfection and gender conformity mean silencing the full range of  Plath's voice, then the poems will fight.

  • Plath makes her choice to fight against the stereotype. Before she was just aware of the stereotype.
• it is a struggle to find an identity that lies outside the fighting

  • Tthrough her poetry, she was searching for her identity.

• "I am" is the mantra of Plath's late  work. Each time she chants it we encounter the  essential use of the simple declarative sentence, the basic seed from which all  speech proliferates. In this respect, every poem in  Ariel is a birth announcement: a different Sylvia is  at hand.

  • Stylistically she uses "I am" repeatedly. Gives her more power throughout the poem.

  • Sounds like Sylvia Plath was spreading her wings.
• Here, as in Daddy, the simple declarative syntax and sarcastic tone are sharp as  a straight razor.
• Even at her most poetically empowered, it seems Plath could  not feel that power outside the confines of the submission/dominance dynamic in  which she was locked.

  • Can't escape society.
• The increasing sarcasm in Plath's late work, as evidenced in  Lady Lazarus and other late poems, suggests that Plath ultimately did not  believe she could overcome the societal and personal forces that would keep her  "destined to be classified and qualified."

  • She didn't believe in herself. Upsetting- could lead to depression- the idea that you can't win.
• paved the way for a next generation of women poets to declare "I am" as  necessary instruction and command.

  • Legacy

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• and readers began to look for them.  And everyone started to look for the answer to her other, equally compelling  legacy: the mystery of exactly why she killed  herself

  • The reason Sylvia Plath is so popular is because society wants an answer for why she killed herself.
• and readers began to look for them.
• "She seemed convinced ... that the root of her suffering was the death of her father, whom  she loved, who abandoned her, and who dragged her after him into death," said  her friend the critic and writer A. Alvarez years later.

  • This leads to "Daddy" and eventually distrust of men (her husband helped with that).
• • "She was also made confused and uncertain by her stirrings of sexual desire;" This led to her questioning the choices women were given (seen in The Bell Jar).
• It's unclear exactly when she began to experience the mood swings and  instability that would plague her the rest of her life--most likely it started  in early adolescence

  • Because the audience doesn't know what started Plath's depression, they don't know what would be the switch to set off her suicide later.
• She was also made confused and uncertain by her stirrings of sexual desire; she  bad the misfortune to possess a strong sexuality in a time and place where such  was considered a liability, if not a sign of depravity.
• "Oh, Mother, the world is so rotten," she told  Aurelia. "I want to die--let's die  together!"

  • The atmosphere of the city stressed Plath and she started to spiral downward.
• Finally, on the afternoon of August 24, physically exhausted, emotionally  bereft, Plath hid in a basement crawl space and swallowed a bottle of sleeping  pills.

  • Electroshock therapy and the past experiences of depression led Sylvia Plath to attempt suicide. (Written about in The Bell Jar)
• The story of their first encounter has the air of a  legend: the tall, dark-haired, and ruggedly handsome  Hughes staring at her from across the room as she stared back; Hughes  approaching her, reaching out to yank her earrings off, saying "Ah, I shall keep  these" as he pocketed them, then leaning down to kiss her; Plath returning the  kiss by' biting Hughes on the cheek so hard she broke the skin. Moments later, as Hughes left the room, she saw blood trickling  down his face. They married four months rarer.

  • Plath chose to marry even though she was aware of the female choices that were given at the time.
• Plath, encumbered by domestic chores, did not achieve quite the same level of  professional distinction as her husband, but she published The Colossus, her  first book of poems

  • Plath still tried to have a successful career when she was a wife- most women would have given up their career.
• The book, which Plath called "a potboiler," is most  significant for showing Plath that the voice she used--casual, direct, and  unpretentious--was one she could also employ in her verse.

  • Plath's style-casual, direct, and unpretentious.
• After The Bell Jar, however, she began to write in a voice  that was as much raging, raw, and insistent as it was technically  proficient. The airy intellectualism of her early work  now disappeared completely, replaced by verse that thudded home like a wrecking  ball in a velvet slipcover.

  • The breakup of Plath's marriage changed everything about Sylvia- her writing, her feelings, and later her actions.- Reason why Ted Hughes was blamed so much for Sylvia Plath's suicide.
• That spring Plath wrote extensively, almost obsessively, sometimes completing  two poems a day.

  • Could writing these poems be from the depression after having a baby?
• the couple had hardly been apart for more than 12 hours in six years

  • one of the jobs of married women
• Plath had decided to divorce Hughes. Over the next 30 days, in a creative torrent she wrote 26 poems  filled with the vivid, unrestrained imagery of her pain and despair.

  • Plath only wrote after bad experiences because it was a way for her to have therapy (without the shock treatment).
• Low on cash, weighed down by the demands and care of two small children, Plath's  reserves were further depleted by the worst weather London had seen in a  century.

  • Seasonal depression added to her sorrow.
• Hughes' abandonment apparently stirred in her the memories and feelings she had  struggled with when her father died

  • led to "Daddy"
• Deciding to end her own life was almost certainly not an  impulsive act, but rather something she had been considering for quite some  time.

  • Sylvia Plath was obviously persisitent that she would die from her own hand.
• Plath was buried in the Hughes family plot in Heptonstall,  Yorkshire, on February 16, 1963.

  • Being buried in her ex-husband's area when society thinks Ted Hughes forced her into suicide- a little odd.
• Although Alvarez knew Plath had not died of viral pneumonia, as one obituary had  stated, he did not mention it.

  • It was unheard of for a woman to commit suicide- means that women aren't happy which men don't want to acknowledge.
• Hughes dropped 12 of the poems Plath had included, added 14  she had not, and rearranged the order in which they appeared.

  • Hughes most likely changed the poems as a self-coping mechanism. Assuming he removed the most important works, he wanted to erase his wrongs and move on with his life. He was not given the oppurtunity to do this.
• Time magazine made Plath's self-destruction a primary element  of its review. Ariel began to sell in unheard-of  numbers for a poetry collection, and it continues to do so--by some estimates,  more than three quarters of a million copies of the collection have been  sold.

  • Plath's legacy lives on because people are obsessed with her actual life-not really the poetry.
• Feminists saw her as a great talent betrayed by  men. Others saw her as representing the poet's reduced  circumstances in an age of industry an d mass marketing

  • Society wants a reason for her downfall-but if they get one, they won't be interested in Sylvia Plath anymore and she would lose all of her popularity. Society wants the mystery.
• In 1969 Assia killed herself and Shura in exactly the same manner as Plath  had--asphyxiation by gas.

  • Hughes is the one who lost everything because of Sylvia Plath's gain.
• When The Journals of Sylvia Plath was published in 1982, he acknowledged  destroying a notebook of journal entries dating from the last months of her  life, triggering howls of protest.

  • Ted Hughes was protecting himself. He should, he has the right to.
• Bitter Fame, as an independent work, saying Olwyn's heavy-handed interference  and insistence on deleting passages that were unfavorable to Hughes had  compromised it beyond repair.

  • The Hughes family is just trying to erase themselves from the situation altogether.
• In 1998 Hughes, who had publicly spoken about Plath only a small number of  times, and then briefly, surprised everyone by publishing Birthday Letters, a  quietly beautiful and occasionally deeply affecting collection of poems about  Sylvia and their marriage.

  • I wonder if he published Birthday Letters for society or for himself.

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• "Daddy," one of Plath's most well known poems,  was written in the months before her suicide  in 1963

  • Means that the meaning of "Daddy" (problems with male figures) was probably the last straw to Sylvia Plath's suicide.
• The poem is dark in tone, and addresses such themes as anger  and the Holocaust.

  • Style of "Daddy" is dark and has Holocaust themes.
• speaker's transformation from victim to self-knowing subject,

  • Also shows the transformation for Sylvia Plath-as she writes she learns more about herself (like confession/therapy).
• suicide attempt at twenty was an attempt to "get back, back, back to you" (59).

  • Sylvia thinks death will bring her back to her father.
• she still suffers both the stifling authority of her father and the pain of his  early death.

  • Sylvia is torn between being happy her father is dead and missing him.
• main theme: the speaker's journey through horror and rage to self-individuation.

  • The main goal in life to Sylvia is to become an individual-but she fought with herself in trying to achieve this.
• Plath introduces the German and Holocaust imagery that dominate the speaker's  presentation of her father.

  • Father is the villain in the Holocaust to her-also makes her the victim.
• This characterization of remote, foreign father and alienated daughter quickly  resolves into a series of Holocaust images, beginning in the  seventh stanza.
• In turn, her father becomes a "panzer [tank] man"-not God after  all "but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through"

  • Sylvia fights with herself on whether her father is her "God" or he is her killer.
• comparing Nazis and Jews to father and daughter, Plath stresses the speaker's  belief that she, too, has been imprisoned, and that her identity as a person has  been taken over and erased.

  • Her father took her identity from her-but he gave her identity to her also. Like Frankenstein, gave him the oppurtunity of love but then wouldn't love him.
• the Holocaust imagery suggests the desperation

  • Sylvia needs to be free from her father.
• and hint at the trauma she must undergo to free herself from it.

  • Hints that she is having arguments with herself over how to achieve her goal.
• theme of masochism:
• Here, we learn that the speaker was ten when her father died, and that ten years  later she tried to commit suicide to be reunited with him, even if only  in death

  • Only way to get back to her father is to die.
• perpetuating the cycle of victimization the poem has detailed.

  • By marrying another man that Sylvia thinks ambandoned her also, she isn't able to escape from her father or the "evils" of men in general.
• • Sylvia Plath's poetry was a form of therapy to analyze her life.
• The poem's last image suggests an analogy between villagers who have destroyed a  vampire and are rejoicing over its death, and the daughter who has finally rid  herself of her father.

  • Sylvia Plath uses imagery to show her relationship with her father and her goal. And how much of a villain he is.
• The fact that the poem narrates a daughter's rebellion against her father is  also significant, reflecting an atmosphere of increasing feminist awareness.

  • Sylvia has gained the knowledge to realize what women have the right to-she can now share this knowledge through her poetry.
• • "Daddy" could just be men in general that the speaker is rebelling against.
• The poem could be read as a harsh critique of patriarchal authority and women's  relegation to passive roles.

  • Gaining female rights.
• Plath's status as a feminist icon.

  • She became one of the literary leaders because of her harsh and rallying poetry.
• Yet, the speaker's attitude toward this God is one of derision rather than  piety. She challenges his power and authority, revealing it to be problematic  and unstable.

  • Extremely empowering-her "God" wronged her.
• In this bleak world, even God himself is dead

  • Like Nietschze-her father is dead.
• This skepticism about the father's power suggests skepticism about power more  generally, including the power of the Christian god to which he is compared.

  • Plath most likely no longer trusts men who had the power at the time.
• • Plath believes humans are intrinsically good. But, then she fights herself on it.
• the natural side of Plath's dichotomy triumphs over the  mechanical one, as the rural villagers overcome the technological advances of  the Nazi-vampire figure.

  • Good will prevail-Sylvia is hopeful that she will beat her father.

  • Romantic
• to an awareness that science and technology can be ineffective, or, with more  disastrous consequences, overreaching.

  • Romantic

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• protofeminist
• Here are her observations about herself and others, her goals and obsessions,  her particular delights, furies, and demons.

  • Sylvia Plath's journals give her exact thoughts in her exact words.
• seeds of her poetry and prose can be located and traced to  fruition with the aid of these  journal entries

  • A reader can make connections between Sylvia's journals and her poetry to see what inspired the ideas in the poetry.
• In the first section of the  journals, dated 1950 to 1955, it is clear that  Plath’s urge to write sprang not only from her driving ambition  but also from her need to justify her life, to confirm her identity even as she  searched for it.

  • Sylvia wanted to learn more about herself so she started writing.
• By her sophomore year at Smith College, she sets her goal: a symbiotic  relationship between husband and wife in which each can work to realize  potential.

  • Her goal was to rebel against society and have both a successful career and a successful marriage (unheard of at the time).
• firmly rejects the traditional 1950’s concept  of a woman’s place

  • Leads to her feminist writings in her book which inspired women to rebel against society.
• and although the early journals evince a  surprising degree of self-awareness, she is often unable to  thwart her negative, self-destructive impulses.

  • Her depression and negative side still comes through in the journals-she can't escape it.
• theme of rebirth

  • one of her goals in life is to forget her past and recreate herself- seen in "Daddy"
• she credits her rebirth to mental magic, a belief that attitude can change  everything.

  • Does this mean she is mentally weak since that belief didn't work?
• ability to choose between dark or light, death or life. The  first entry parallels the opening of her  novel, The Bell Jar (1963), as she speaks of  her physical sickness at the imminent electrocution  of the Rosenbergs.

  • Plath wants the choices. Plath has the ability to know what is right and what is wrong-she wants to know that a person is definitely bad or good.
• • Sylvia Plath had a problem with men: her father deserted her and she worries it will repeat with Ted Hughes.
• is concerned about losing her writing self in the world  of domesticity

  • seen in The Bell Jar with Buddy
• She recollects her electroshock therapy as “waking to a new world, with no name,  being born again, and not of woman.”

  • it was an unhappy rebirth
• The poems, “Whiteness I Remember” and “Ariel” seem to derive in  part from the following entry: “Then there was  the time . . . when the horse galloped into  the street-crossing and the stirrups came off  leaving me hanging around his neck, jarred breathless, thinking in an ecstasy:  is this the way the end will be?”

  • Sylvia Plath wanted to die-she thought it was finally over
• references to colors (red and black, colors she often wore), to fire and  electricity (tied to passion and to destruction), to the moon,  frogs, sea, rock — a fascinating mine for Plath scholars.

  • symbolism of Plath's
• Plath’s two-headed demon of self-doubt and  ambitious perfectionism never leaves her

  • always worries-makes her do better academically and in life but she can never be good enough
• Plath continues to fight her demon, the one  who “wants me to think I’m so good I must be perfect. Or nothing.”

  • she knows she can't be perfect but she feels she has to be (might be an idea by her father that can't leave her)
• In her journal, she even wonders if her poetry is simply an  escape from prose, from the novel and stories she longs to  write.

  • she wonders if her poetry is meaningless nonsense that she uses to hide from what she really feels (comes out when she writes prose)
• recurring conflicts and problems: the issues  of father-search, mother-guilt, hostility, and manipulation, as  well as Plath’s concern with rebirth, a desire to remake  herself as a strong woman and writer. Apparent is her urge to become  independent, both from Hughes — to show him none of her poems —  and from her mother — to avoid confiding in her.
• the final two notebooks from late 1959 until her death in  February, 1963, are not available — the last one destroyed by  Hughes, the other missing.
• The Journals of  Sylvia Plath are edited selections,  encompassing only one-third of Plath’s  notebook entries

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• The daughter of scholarly parents, Sylvia  Plath published her first poem at the age of  eight in the Boston Sunday Herald.

  • since her parents were scholarly, they probably set the standard of perfection for Sylvia
• she finished more than two hundred and fifty poems
• Aurelia Schober, Plath's mother, was an avid reader who taught  English and German at a high school.
• Otto Plath, at Boston University, where she was a student in  one of his classes.
• born on October 27, 1932
• Winthrop, Massachusetts
• died from an embolism
• Smith College in 1950, receiving three scholarships
• letters reported episodes of severe depression
• June of 1953 Plath fell into a great  depression when she learned she had not been accepted in Frank O'Connor's summer  school writing course at Harvard

  • one of Sylvia's greatest fears-she failed
• note saying she was going off on a long walk

  • can't forgive herself for failing-later turns into hatred towards her father for instilling this idea
• hid herself in their basement, where she took an overdose of  sleeping pills
• Three days later Plath was heard moaning, found semiconscious,  revived, and hospitalized.
• Fulbright scholarship
• highest possible grade-point average
• June of 1956 she had married Ted Hughes
• "the only man in the world who is my match."

  • finally found an equal and an escape from her life in Hughes
• Freida Rebecca, in April 1960
• first book of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems.
• miscarriag
• she felt strained after giving birth to a son

  • post-partum depression
• Nicholas, in January 1962
• husband and Assia
• Angered, she burned her manuscript for a second novel that contained many  elements about her romance and marriage to Hughes.

  • after affair was learned of-she lost all trust in men and most likely humans totally
• Three Women
• Plath drove her car off the road, yet was unharmed

  • another suicide attempt
• third novel, Double Exposure
• Victoria Lucas

  • fake name
• January of 1963 The Bell Jar
• focus on the main character's recovery and rebirth
• Plath took many sleeping pills and allowed herself to be  consumed by the fumes from the gas oven
• April 11, 1963
• Ted Hughes, still legally Plath's husband, then took control  of her work, getting Ariel published in 1965
• ending it with her bee poems and their focus on rebirth

  • he wanted her to live on- not have such an unhappy ending like in real life
• the inevitability of death
• The Collected Poems, which became one of the few works that has  been awarded a Pulitzer Prize posthumously

  • awards given

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