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Sylvia Plath’s works do not support the American Dream, because they illustrate the challenges that women faced during the era, place financial struggles at the forefront, and present the situation of women and the lower class as hopeless by describing characters who are consistently unable to succeed despite their hard work.

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Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, goes against the American Dream by including themes of the oppression of women and the hopelessness of hard work. The main character of the novel, Esther, lives in, “the male-dominated 1950s American society,” which, “does not encourage Esther to excel.” She pursues her ambitions but fails time and time again and loses hope, eventually attempting suicide. Her repeated failure and suicide attempt send a message to the reader that hard work is hopeless for women, and that not everyone can succeed. This idea, along with the idea that Esther was not encouraged to excel by American society, directly contradict the American Dream idea that American society allows anyone to succeed through hard work.

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Unlike most of the women who attended Smith College in 1950s, Esther Greenwood of Plath's The Bell Jar did not come from a wealthy family. That her family gets by on her mother's earnings as a typing teacher and on Esther's full-time scholarship explains why she does not normally have access to such luxuries as expensive clothes, travel, and summer homes. Hence, Esther is outside of the mainstream social circle at college and will never really fit in unless she marries into it. Aware of this, Esther makes many attempts to connect socially-she dates Buddy Willard mostly because he attends Yale; she baby-sits on Cape Cod to be in close proximity to wealthy people; she shops at expensive clothing stores for items on sale.

To complicate matters further, Esther comes to resent her own financial dependence on her mentor, the wealthy writer Philomena Guinea. Since Esther ultimately needs her patronage for continuing psychological care as well as for education, Esther becomes even more frustrated with her own financial dependence, although she seldom expresses this anger directly.

Yet in other ways, Esther is fairly typical of other Smith students: white, educated, attractive, and studious. That she is socially cut off from women with whom she has so much in common is one of the ironies of The Bell Jar.

Although The Bell Jar is partly about the impact of economics on a brilliant student with limited financial reserves, it also concerns sex roles in the 1950s. In that decade, women, generally speaking, did not attend college to ultimately support themselves; they were expected to marry eventually. In the novel, there are three women who have created real identities for themselves separate from the men in their life. The unglamorous editor Jay Cee has succeeded in that, but she has also sacrificed a certain amount of femininity to get there; the writer Philomena Guinea has thrived creatively on her own terms; Esther's psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan, emerges as a caring, competent professional. However, they are exceptions in Esther's frame of reference, as well as in the male-dominated 1950s American society. More typical are wisecracking Doreen who depends on men for sex if not necessarily for marriage; traditional Betsy who patiently waits for domesticity; Dodo Conway whom Esther perceives as kind of a baby machine; and Joan Gilling whose combination of ambition and lesbianism have not made her into a happy, functional person. Even widowed Mrs. Greenwood, who earns her own money as a typing teacher, does not encourage her smart daughter to flourish: she prefers that Esther learn shorthand and eventually marry well.

Given these feminine influences, Esther channels much of her energy into men as potential husbands or as a means of losing her virginity. Nearly all of the men fall short, often because Esther resents their attempts to informally teach her something without really listening to her. Even men who are not potential lovers fancy themselves as instructors, for example, the old doctor at the sanatorium who foolishly imparts great knowledge about pilgrims. As The Bell Jar progresses, Esther loses most of her interest in marriage, but not in losing her virginity.

Esther also reserves much of her affection for her late father, who died when she was only nine, an event from which she has never psychologically recovered. As Lindsay Wagner-Martin wrote in The Bell Jar: A Novel of the Fifties, "...while it is-as she has consistently been taught-unseemly for her to be angry with her dead father, there is little stigma attached to her being angry with her living mother."

In The Bell Jar, Esther searches consistently for some kind of identity but finds her options limited as a young woman with little money of her own. After a disappointing summer as a guest editor in New York City, she fails to be accepted into a prestigious writing course and gradually loses much of her sanity and ambition. She mentally explores many wild scenarios for happiness and fulfillment (e.g., apprenticing herself to a pottery maker, finding a European lover), tries to write a novel, does such bizarre things as wearing her mother's clothes and eating raw meat, and finally attempts suicide. Obviously, she is not mentally well, but to some extent society's repressions for females and the lack of creative inspiration in her life have both contributed to her collapse.

Since society does not encourage Esther to excel-her excellent grades not withstanding-she sometimes competes in bizarre ways. For example, at a banquet for the guest interns at Ladies' Day, she eats ravenously as if she must consume more than any of the other interns. She also feels inferior to Buddy Willard because he lost his virginity before she did.

Esther recovers much of her mental and emotional stability by the end of the novel, but the reasons for her improvement are not entirely clear. To some extent, Dr. Nolan has empowered Esther to understand her motivations, actions, and reactions, but some would argue Esther has at least partly responded to electroconvulsive shock. At least one critic, David Holbrook in Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, even questions to what extent Esther has recovered, when he writes, "All that her therapy achieves is symbolised by the last chapter that blankets the asylum grounds... Sylvia Plath's insight is not deceived. `Treatment' merely freezes her." Linda Wagner- Martin disagrees: "...Esther has indeed entered a new phase...she enters her new birth ritual, the process of leaving the asylum for the real world, with as much confidence as an intelligent person can muster...There is no question that Plath intended to create a thoroughly positive ending for Esther's narrative." While the extent of Esther's recovery is debatable, the search for her identity will certainly continue after she is released from the asylum.

Told in first person, Esther Greenwood narrates Plath's entire novel The Bell Jar. From this perspective, the reader sees guest editor Esther in the miserable summer of 1953, her selective childhood and college memories, her romantic history, her breakdown and subsequent period of institutionalization, and her road to recovery. Despite her considerable intelligence, a careful reader will not necessarily take everything she says on faith, especially in light of her history of depression and occasionally bizarre behavior. The careful reader will also take into consideration that Esther's feelings shift quite abruptly on such subjects as role models and marriage. Though the narrative generally proceeds in a straightforward, chronological fashion, occasionally jumping back and forth in time, many questions arise. Why, for example, does Esther hate her mother so much? Why does she leave her drunken friend Doreen in the hotel hallway? Why does she reduce so many people around her to unpleasant stereotypes? Above all, why is Esther so unhappy? Part of the answer can be found in the oppressive 1950s environment, but can other factors figure into it? What factors really contributed to her recovery? After observing Esther in an assortment of situations, the reader can form his or her own impressions.

Literally, most of The Bell Jar takes place in either New York City or the Boston vicinity. The time is mostly the latter half of 1953, although Esther occasionally makes reference to earlier occasions in her narration. On a figurative level, much of the novel occurs in the mind of its protagonist, Esther Greenwood.

On the simplest level, The Bell Jar , Plath's only novel, refers to the social pressure for young women to marry in the 1950s. One of the causes of Esther's depression is her worry that she would not make a good wife for all of the following reasons: She cannot cook, stands too tall, and dances poorly. Unfortunately, she thinks her positive qualities-a high degree of intelligence, ambition, a literary aptitude-are actually handicaps in the marriage market. On other occasions, Esther thinks she could never be happy in any marriage, regardless of whom she finds as a husband.

The Bell Jar overflows with other symbolism; one of the most important is birth and rebirth. In one scene, Esther witnesses a birth in the teaching hospital where Buddy Willard works: "I was so struck by the sight of the table where they were lifting the woman I didn't say a word. It looked like some awful torture table, with these metal stirrups sticking up at mid-air at one end and all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes...." Her continuing description of the birthing is accurate and precise, but completely lacking in any sense of joy and wonderment. As Lynda K. Bundtzen writes in Plath's Incarnations: "The problem... is that men have usurped the privilege of giving birth from women. The doctors are all male and they are entirely responsible for the emergence of a new creature into the world." So for Esther, a woman giving birth is no cause for celebration; it is symbolic of male oppression.

The subject of rebirth comes up figuratively in the conclusion of the novel. Note Esther's description of the elements: "The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of clouds, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes... I felt the profound thrill it gives me to see trees and grassland waist-high under flood water, as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase."

Some critics have suggested that with the death of Joan Gilling, the character who most resembles Esther Greenwood, the latter is liberated from some of her pain. As Stan Smith notes in Critical Quarterly, "Esther is left wondering, at Joan's funeral, just what she thinks she is burying, the "wry black image" of her madness, or the `beaming double of her old best self.' In a sense, the suicide of this surrogate is Esther's rebirth."

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Unlike most of the women who attended Smith College in 1950s, Esther Greenwood of Plath's The Bell Jar did not come from a wealthy family. That her family gets by on her mother's earnings as a typing teacher and on Esther's full-time scholarship explains why she does not normally have access to such luxuries as expensive clothes, travel, and summer homes.

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Plath’s work tends to have a bleak attitude towards life and the possibility of success. Her work is influenced by, “her increasing anger, bitterness, and despair toward life,” and displays, “the increasing frustration of her aspirations,” later in her life. These scornful feelings are not indicative of one who thinks highly of American society. The inclusion of references to Plath’s aspirations being impeded paints a picture of an American society that is harsh and shatters people’s dreams.

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Born: October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Died: February 11, 1963 in London, United Kingdom

Other Names: Lucas, Victoria (American poet); Hughes, Sylvia

American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist, and scriptwriter.

Considered an important poet of the post-World War II era, Plath became widely known following her suicide in 1963 and the posthumous publication of Ariel (1965), a collection containing her most startling and acclaimed verse. Through bold metaphors and stark, often violent and unsettling imagery, Plath's works evoke some of the mythic qualities of nature and human experience. Her vivid, intense poems explore such topics as personal identity, individual suffering and oppression, and the inevitability of death. Deeply informed by autobiographical elements, Plath's writings poignantly reflect her struggles with despair and mental illness. Her efforts to assert a strong female identity and to balance familial, marital, and career aspirations have established her as a representative voice for feminist concerns. While Plath is frequently linked with confessional poets Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman, all of whom directly express personal torments and anguish in their work, critics have noted that many of Plath's poems are dramatic monologues voiced by a character who is not necessarily autobiographical. Although sometimes faulted as self-indulgent and preoccupied with death and psychological suffering, Plath continues to be read widely, and her work has generated numerous scholarly studies.

Born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Plath enjoyed an idyllic early childhood near the sea. Her father, a German immigrant, was a professor of entomology who was especially interested in the study of bees. His sudden death from diabetes mellitus in 1940 devastated the eight-year-old Plath, and many critics note the significance of this traumatic experience in interpreting her poetry, which frequently contains both brutal and reverential images of her father as well as sea imagery and allusions to bees. Plath began publishing poetry at an early age in such periodicals as Seventeen and the Christian Science Monitor, and in 1950 she earned a scholarship to Smith College. After spending a month during the summer of her junior year in New York City as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine, Plath suffered a mental collapse which resulted in her attempted suicide and subsequent institutionalization. Plath later chronicled the circumstances and consequences of this breakdown in her best-selling novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Following her recovery, Plath returned to Smith and graduated summa cum laude. After winning a Fulbright fellowship to study at Cambridge University, Plath met and soon married Ted Hughes, an English poet. The eventual failure of their marriage during the early 1960s and the ensuing struggles with severe depression that led to her suicide are considered crucial elements of Plath's most critically acclaimed poetry.

Plath's verse is represented in several volumes. The Colossus (1960), the only book of her poems published during her lifetime, collects pieces dating from the mid-to late 1950s; Ariel contains poems selected by Hughes from among the many works Plath composed during the final months before her death; Winter Trees (1971) collects several more of the Ariel poems and reflects Hughes's plan to publish Plath's later works in intervals; Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems (1971) reprints most of her post- Colossus and pre- Ariel verse; and The Collected Poems (1981), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, features all of her verse, including juvenilia and several previously unpublished pieces in order of composition. Critics often maintain that during her brief career, Plath's verse evolved from a somewhat derivative early style to that of a unique and accomplished poetic voice. Katha Pollitt commented: "Plath's was one of those rare poetic careers-Keats's was another-that moved consistently and with gathering rapidity and assurance to an ever greater daring and individuality."

Plath's early verse reflects various poetic influences, evoking the mythic qualities of the works of William Butler Yeats and Ted Hughes, the diverse experiments with form and language of Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. H. Auden, and the focus on personal concerns that dominates the verse of Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. Most of her early poems are formal, meticulously crafted, and feature elaborate syntax and well-developed metaphors, as Plath employed such forms as the ode, the villanelle, and the pastoral lyric to examine art, love, nature, and personal themes. These pieces are more subdued than the later work for which she would become renowned. Critics generally believe that some of the later poems in The Colossus heralded a new phase in Plath's career. Marjorie Perloff commented: "[When], in the last two years of her life, [Plath] finally came into her own, the adopted voices merely evaporated, and a new harsh, demonic, devastating self, only partially prefigured in such poems as `The Thin People' (1957) and `The Stones' (1959), came into being."

Plath's later work displays the increasing frustration of her aspirations. Her ambitions of finding happiness through work, marriage, and family were thwarted by such events as hospital stays for a miscarriage and an appendectomy, the breakup of her marriage, and fluctuating moods in which she felt vulnerable to male domination and threatening natural forces, particularly death. After the dissolution of her marriage, Plath moved with her two children from the Devon countryside to a London flat, where Irish poet William Butler Yeats once resided, and wrote feverishly from the summer of 1962 until her death in February of the following year. Many of her best-known poems, including "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "Lesbos," "Purdah," and "Edge," were composed during this period and form the nucleus of the Ariel collection. These pieces, which reflect her increasing anger, bitterness, and despair toward life, feature intense, rhythmic language that blends terse statements, sing-song passages, repetitive phrasing, and sudden violent images, metaphors, and declarations. For example, in "Daddy," perhaps her most frequently discussed and anthologized work, Plath denounces her father's dominance over her life and, among other allusions, associates him with nazism and herself with Jewish victims of the Holocaust: "I have always been scared of you / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. / And your neat moustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue. / Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-." Plath explained in a radio broadcast that the poem's narrator is "a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God." Response to "Daddy" reflects the general critical opinion toward much of her later work. Some critics contend that Plath's jarring effects are extravagant, and many object to her equation of personal sufferings with such horrors as those experienced by victims of Nazi genocide. Others praise the passion and formal structure of her later poems, through which she confronts her tensions and conflicts. Stanley Plumly stated that "behind the separate masks, all the masks of [Plath's] good poems, there is a unity, an integrity, and an integrating of imagination-that whatever the hammer-splittings of the self, behind the sad mask of the woman is the mind and heart of someone making transcendent poems."

Plath published The Bell Jar, which appeared shortly before her death, under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas. She was unsure of the quality of the work and feared that it might offend those people, particularly her mother, on whom the characters are based. This novel details a college student's disappointing adventures during a summer month in New York City as a guest editor for a fashion magazine, her despair upon returning home, her attempted suicide, and the electroshock treatments and institutionalization she undergoes to "cure" her of depression and lethargy. The narrator of The Bell Jar encounters many of the pressures and problems Plath examined in her verse: her attempts to establish her identity are consistently undermined, she projects an ambivalent attitude toward men, society remains indifferent to her sensitivity, vulnerability, and artistic ambitions, and she is haunted by events from her past, particularly the death of her father. Although critical reception to The Bell Jar was mixed, reviewers praised the novel's satiric portrait of American society and its poignant study of the growing disillusionment of a talented young woman.

The posthumous publication of Plath's writings in other genres, many of which were edited by Ted Hughes, reflects the continuing interest in her work. Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968) is a verse play originally presented on British radio in 1962 in which three women discuss pregnancy. Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963 (1975) reveals Plath's reactions to pivotal events in her adult life through the publication of letters she exchanged with her mother. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and Other Prose Writings (1977) collects short stories and excerpts from her diaries in which Plath reworked the personal experiences, themes, and topics she frequently explored in her verse. The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982), which includes most of the extensive diary entries Plath compiled during her lifetime, received substantial critical attention. Katha Pollitt described this collection as "a storehouse of ideas for stories, novels, and poems; of stray phrases and incidents that would turn up, sometimes years later, in her finished work. They are the place, too, where she chronicled an almost unbroken parade of depressions, blocks, and visits of the `Panic Bird,' and where she urged herself, over and over, year after dragging year, to throw herself into writing."

PERSONAL INFORMATION:

Born October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States; committed suicide, February 11, 1963, in London, England; buried in Heptonstall, Yorkshire, England; daughter of Otto Emil (a professor) and Aurelia (a teacher; maiden name, Schober) Plath; married Ted Hughes (a poet), June 16, 1956 (separated, 1962); children: Frieda Rebecca, Nicholas Farrar. Education: Smith College, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1955; attended Harvard University, summer, 1954; Newnham College, Cambridge, Fulbright scholar, 1955-57, M.A., 1957. Religion: Unitarian Universalist. Memberships: Phi Beta Kappa.

CAREER:

Worked as a volunteer art teacher at the People's Institute, Northampton, MA, while in college; served as guest editor with Mademoiselle, summer, 1953; taught English at Smith College, 1957-58; lived in Boston, 1958-59, and Yaddo, 1959; settled in London, England, 1959, then in Devon, England.

AWARDS:

Mademoiselle College Board contest winner in fiction, 1953; Irene Glascock Poetry Prize, Mount Holyoke College, 1955; Bess Hokin Award, Poetry magazine, 1957; first prize in Cheltenham Festival, 1961; Eugene F. Saxon fellowship, 1961; Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 1982, for Collected Poems.

WORKS:

Poetry

The Colossus, Heinemann, 1960, new version published as The Colossus and Other Poems, Knopf, 1962.

(Editor) American Poetry Now (supplement number 2 toCritical Quarterly, ) Oxford University Press, 1961.

Uncollected Poems (booklet), Turret Books (London), 1965.

Ariel, Faber, 1965, Harper, 1966.

Wreath for a Bridal (limited edition), Sceptre Press, 1970.

Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems, Harper, 1971.

Crystal Gazer and Other Poems (limited edition), Rainbow Press (London), 1971.

Lyonnesse (limited edition), Rainbow Press, 1971.

Million Dollar Month (limited edition), Sceptre Press, 1971.

Winter Trees, Faber, 1971, Harper, 1972.

Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes, Harper, 1981.

Stings (drafts), Smith College, 1983.

Poetry included in anthologies, including The New Yorker Book of Poems, Viking, 1969. Early Poems, a collection of Plath's work, was published as the May, 1967, issue of Harvard Advocate; fifty of her early unpublished poems appeared in Times Literary Supplement, July 31, 1969.

Other

(Under pseudonym Victoria Lucas) The Bell Jar (novel), Heinemann, 1963, published under real name, Faber, 1965, Harper, 1971.

Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (radio play; broadcast on British Broadcasting Corporation in 1962; limited edition), Turret Books, 1968.

Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963, selected and edited with a commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath, Harper, 1975.

The Bed Book (for children), Harper, 1976.

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts, Harper, 1979.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Hughes and Frances McCullough, Ballantine, 1983.

The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit (for children), illustrated by Rotraut Susanne Berner, St. Martin's (New York City), 1996.

Contributor to periodicals, including Seventeen, Christian Science Monitor, Mademoiselle, Harper's, Nation, Atlantic, Poetry, and London Magazine.

Adaptations

A film version of The Bell Jar was produced by Avco-Embassy in 1978; Letters Home was adapted into a play by Rose Leiman Goldemberg and staged in 1979.

FURTHER READINGS:

Books

Aird, E. M., Sylvia Plath, Harper, 1973.

Alvarez, A., The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, Random House, 1972.

Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Prentice Hall, 1996.

Chapman, Lynne F., Sylvia Plath (biography), Creative Education, 1994.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The New Consciousness, 1941-1968, Gale, 1987.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1974; Volume 3, 1975; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 9, 1978; Volume 11, 1979; Volume 14, 1980; Volume 17, 1981; Volume 50, 1988; Volume 51, 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Volume 6, American Novelists since World War II, 1980.

Hargrove, Nancy Duvall, The Journey Toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath's Poems of 1956-1959, Lund University Press, 1994.

Haberkamp, Frederike, Sylvia Plath: The Poetics of Beekeeping, International Specialised Book Services, 1997.

Hall, Caroline King Barnard, Sylvia Plath, Revised, Twayne, 1998.

Hughes, Ted, Birthday Letters, Wheeler, 1998.

Malcolm, Janet, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath Ted Hughes, A. A. Knopf, 1994.

Newman, Charles, editor, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, Indiana University Press, 1970.

Plath, Sylvia, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough, Ballantine, 1983.

Steiner, N. H., A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath, Harper's Magazine Press, 1973.

Stevenson, Anne, Bitter Fame: The Undiscovered Life of Sylvia Plath, Houghton, 1989.

Strangeways, Al, Sylvia Plath: The Shaping of Shadows, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.

Wagner-Martin, Linda, Sylvia Plath: A Biography, Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Writers on Themselves, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1964.

Periodicals

Atlantic, August, 1966.

Critical Quarterly, Volume 7, number 1, 1965.

Ms., September, 1972.

New Republic, June 18, 1966; June 6, 1994, p. 34.

Newsweek, June 20, 1966.

New Yorker, August 23, 1993, p. 84.

New York Times, October 9, 1979.

Observer, June 1, 1986; February 18, 1996.

Partisan Review, winter, 1967.

Poetry, March, 1963, January, 1967.

Publishers Weekly, May 20, 1996, p. 258.

Reporter, October 7, 1965.

Time, June 10, 1966.

Tri-Quarterly, fall, 1966.*

Source Citation

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Born: October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States Died: February 11, 1963 in London, United Kingdom Other Names: Lucas, Victoria (American poet); Hughes, Sylvia American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist, and scriptwriter.

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On top of her defeatist view on the potential for achieving one’s ambitions, Sylvia Plath’s work is generally characterized by pessimistic themes and imagery. Her work is described as having a cynical tone and as including, ”bold metaphors and stark, often violent and unsettling imagery.” The unsettling themes she wrote about include mental illness and suicide, and it has been suggested that Plath was, “preoccupied with death and psychological suffering.” One who believes that hard work is rewarded would likely have a more optimistic tone in their work. The dark and cynical nature of Plath’s work indicates that Plath does not agree with the American Dream.

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Born: October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Died: February 11, 1963 in London, United Kingdom

Other Names: Lucas, Victoria (American poet); Hughes, Sylvia

Page 1308

BORN: 1932, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

DIED: 1963, London, England

GENRE: Poetry, fiction, short stories

MAJOR WORKS:
Colossus (1960)
The Bell Jar (1963)
Ariel (1965)
The Collected Poems (1981)

Overview

Considered an important poet of the post-World War II era, Plath became widely known following her suicide in 1963 and the posthumous publication of Ariel (1965), a collection containing her most startling and acclaimed verse.

Page 1309

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

Father's Death Leaves Lasting Damage Born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Plath enjoyed what she described as an idyllic early childhood near the sea. Her father, a German immigrant, was a professor of entomology who was especially interested in the study of bees. But his sudden death from diabetes in 1940 devastated the eight-year-old Plath, and many critics note the significance of this traumatic experience in interpreting her poetry, which frequently contains both brutal and reverential images of her father as well as sea imagery and allusions to bees.

Mental Collapse and Partial Recovery Plath began publishing poetry at an early age, in such periodicals as Seventeen and the Christian Science Monitor, and in 1950 she earned a scholarship to Smith College. After spending a month during the summer of her junior year in New York City as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine, Plath suffered a mental collapse, which resulted in her attempted suicide and subsequent institutionalization. Mental health care in the 1950s was vastly superior than at any point in the past, as various advocacy groups had succeeded in pushing through reforms in the late 1940s. Still, treatment for depression was limited, and mental illness was stigmatized.

Plath later chronicled the circumstances and consequences of this breakdown in her best-selling novel, The Bell Jar (1963), a work considered groundbreaking for its open description of mental illness. Following her recovery, Plath returned to Smith and graduated summa cum laude. After winning a Fulbright fellowship to study at Cambridge University, Plath met and married Ted Hughes, an English poet. The eventual failure of their marriage during the early 1960s-and the ensuing struggles with severe depression that led to her suicide-are considered to have played crucial roles in Plath's most critically acclaimed poetry.

Posthumous Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize Plath's verse is well-represented in several different volumes. The Colossus (1960), the only book of her poems published during her lifetime, collects pieces dating from the mid- to late 1950s; Ariel contains poems selected by Hughes from among the many works Plath composed during the final months before her death; Winter Trees (1971) collects several more of the Ariel poems and reflects Hughes's plan to publish Plath's later works in intervals; Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems (1971) reprints most of her post- Colossus and pre- Ariel verse; and The Collected Poems (1981), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, features all of her verse, including juvenilia and several previously unpublished pieces in order of composition.

Frustrations Displayed in Later Works Critics generally believe that some of the later poems in The Colossus heralded a new phase in Plath's career. Generally speaking, Plath's later work displays the increasing frustration of her aspirations. Her ambitions of finding happiness through work, marriage, and family were thwarted by such events as hospital stays for a miscarriage and an appendectomy, the breakup of her marriage, and fluctuating moods in which she felt vulnerable to male domination and threatening natural forces, particularly death. After the dissolution of her marriage, Plath moved with her two children from the Devon countryside to a London flat, where Irish poet William Butler Yeats had once resided, and wrote feverishly from the summer of 1962 until her suicide in February of the following year. Plath was writing during a relatively conservative period that lasted from the end of World War II until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In Western Europe and the United States, suburban development and the nuclear family became symbols of the era that were later sharply contrasted by the social revolution of the 1960s. Plath likely felt stymied by the constraints of a society that valued men's career goals more than women's.

Haunted by Her Past Plath published The Bell Jar, which appeared shortly before her death, under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas. She was unsure of the quality of

Page 1310

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LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES

Among Plath's famous contemporaries were:

Anne Sexton (1928-1974): An American poet and writer who, along with Plath, advanced the genre of confessional poetry.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977): Considered by many to be one of the best American poets of the twentieth century, the work of this American writer frequently concerns questions of history and the self.

Karl Jay Shapiro (1913-2000): A poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his work V-Letter, and Other Poems (1945).

Ted Hughes (1930-1998): An English poet and children's writer who served as the British poet laureate from 1984 until his death; over the course of his life, Hughes maintained a significant interest in the work of Plath, his one-time wife.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986): A French author and philosopher who wrote an extended analysis of the oppression of women in her treatise The Second Sex (1949).

the work and feared that it might offend those people, particularly her mother, on whom the characters are based. This novel details a college student's disappointing adventures during a summer month in New York City as a guest editor for a fashion magazine, her despair upon returning home, her attempted suicide, and the electroshock treatments and institutionalization she undergoes to "cure" her of depression and lethargy. The narrator of The Bell Jar encounters many of the pressures and problems Plath examined in her verse: Her attempts to establish her identity are consistently undermined, she projects an ambivalent attitude toward men, society remains indifferent to her sensitivity, vulnerability, and artistic ambitions, and she is haunted by events from her past, particularly the death of her father.

Ultimately, Plath became overwhelmed by the trials of her personal life. By February 1963 her marriage was over and she was ill, struggling to care for her two small children in a cramped flat in London. Outside, the winter was the coldest the city had seen in decades. On Monday, February 11, she committed suicide.

Works in Literary Context

Plath's early verse reflects various poetic influences, evoking the mythic qualities of the works of William Butler Yeats and Ted Hughes, the diverse experiments with form and language of Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. H. Auden, and the focus on personal concerns that dominates the verse of Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. Her later works are marked by the influences of her failed marriage and haunting past.

Themes of Despair and Mental Illness Through bold metaphors and stark, often violent and unsettling imagery, Plath's works present nature and human experience as mythic, or larger than life. Her vivid, intense poems explore such topics as personal identity, individual suffering and oppression, as well as the inevitability of death. Deeply informed by autobiographical elements, Plath's writings poignantly reflect her struggles with despair and mental illness.

Plath's Ariel poems reflect her increasing anger, bitterness, and despair toward life and feature intense, rhythmic language that blends terse statements, sing-song passages, repetitive phrasing, and sudden violent images, metaphors, and declarations. For example, in "Daddy," perhaps her most frequently discussed and anthologized work, Plath denounces her father's dominance over her life and, among other allusions, associates him with Nazism and herself with Jewish victims of the Holocaust: "I have always been scared of you / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. / And your neat moustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue. / Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-." Plath explained in a radio broadcast that the poem's narrator is "a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God."

Academic Interest in Plath's Unique Voice Plath's efforts to assert a strong female identity and to balance familial, marital, and career aspirations have established her as a representative voice for feminist concerns. While Plath is frequently linked with confessional poets Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman, all of whom directly express personal torments and anguish in their work, critics have noted that many of Plath's poems are dramatic monologues voiced by a character who is not necessarily autobiographical. Although sometimes faulted as self-indulgent and preoccupied with death and psychological suffering, Plath continues to be read widely, and her work has generated numerous scholarly studies.

Journals, Verse Plays, and Short Stories The posthumous publication of Plath's writings in other genres, many of which were edited by Ted Hughes, reflects the continuing interest in her work. Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968) is a verse play originally presented on British radio in 1962, in which three women discuss pregnancy. Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963 (1975) reveals Plath's reactions to pivotal events in her adult life through the publication of letters she exchanged with her mother. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and Other Prose Writings (1977) collects short stories and excerpts from her diaries in which Plath reworked the personal experiences, themes, and topics she frequently explored in her verse. The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982), which includes most of the extensive diary entries Plath compiled during her lifetime, has received substantial critical Page 1311 attention. Katha Pollitt described this latter collection as "a storehouse of ideas for stories, novels, and poems; of stray phrases and incidents that would turn up, sometimes years later, in her finished work. They are the place, too, where she chronicled an almost unbroken parade of depressions, blocks, and visits of the 'Panic Bird,' and where she urged herself, over and over, year after dragging year, to throw herself into writing."

Works in Critical Context

Critics often maintain that during her brief career, Plath's verse evolved from an early style in which she seemed to model her work on that of other, earlier poets to a later display of a unique and accomplished poetic voice. Katha Pollitt commented: "Plath's was one of those rare poetic careers-Keats' was another-that moved consistently and with gathering rapidity and assurance to an ever greater daring and individuality." Although critical reception of her work The Bell Jar was mixed, reviewers praised the novel's satiric portrait of American society and its poignant study of the growing disillusionment of a talented young woman.

Building Sanity in the Ariel Poems Response to "Daddy" reflected the general critical opinion toward much of Plath's later work. Some critics contended that Plath's jarring effects are extravagant, and many objected to her equation of personal sufferings with such horrors as those experienced by victims of Nazi genocide. Others praised the passion and formal structure of her later poems, through which she confronts her tensions and conflicts. Some recent readings of her work have emphasized the connection between Plath's struggle to maintain her own unstable mental health and the thematic content of her poetry. Jon Rosenblatt wrote, for example, "What her poems reveal again and again is her tremendously violent struggle to gain control of the psyche. Each of Plath's poems portrays in different but parallel settings a momentary ordering of the symbols of life and death." Likewise, Stanley Plumly stated that "behind the separate masks, all the masks of [Plath's] good poems, there is a unity, an integrity, and an integrating of imagination-that whatever the hammer-splittings of the self, behind the sad mask of the woman is the mind and heart of someone making transcendent poems."

Responses to Literature

1. Analyzing specific passages from the text, discuss the reasons for Esther's madness in The Bell Jar.

2. Select a recurring image from The Bell Jar-like mirrors, blood, or trees-and trace the evolution of its meaning from its first appearance to its last.

3. Compare and contrast the imagery Plath uses in her poetry with that of her novel, The Bell Jar.

4. Discuss aspects of the feminine experience as they appear in Plath's poetry collection Ariel. What do these poems suggest about life for women in the 1990s?

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COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Foremost among Plath's themes is mental illness. Other works that explore this theme include:

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), a nonfiction book by Michel Foucault. This work traces the shifting meaning of insanity in Western history.

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a novel by Ken Kesey. Inspired by Kesey's tenure at a mental health facility, this story is narrated by a Native American, the Chief, who has been institutionalized in a mental hospital since World War II.

Girl, Interrupted (1993), a memoir by Susanna Kaysen. In this work, successfully adapted for film in 1999, the author describes her experiences receiving treatment for a borderline personality disorder as a patient in a psychiatric hospital.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In this popular and disturbing short story, Gilman chronicles the experience of an apparently sane female writer whose husband and doctor insist on her mental illness-confining her to her room, preventing her from writing, and ultimately driving her mad.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Aird, Eileen M. Sylvia Plath. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973.

Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath, Method and Madness. New York: Seabury, 1976.

Hobrook, David. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. London: Athlone, 1976.

Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Melander, Ingrid. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Study of Themes. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1972.

Meyering, Sheryl L. Sylvia Plath: A Reference Guide, 1973-1988. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

Newman, Charles H., ed. The Art of Sylvia Plath. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.

Northouse, Cameron, and Thomas Walsh. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1974.

Steiner, Nancy Hunter. A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1973.

Wagner, Linda W., ed. Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

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Born: October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States Died: February 11, 1963 in London, United Kingdom Other Names: Lucas, Victoria (American poet); Hughes, Sylvia Page 1308 BORN: 1932, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts DIED: 1963, London, England GENRE: Poetry, fiction, short stories MAJOR WORKS: Colossus (1960) The Bell Jar (1963) Ariel (1965) The Collected Poems (1981) Considered an important poet of the post-World War II era, Plath became widely known following her suicide in 1963 and the posthumous publication of Ariel (1965), a collection containing her most startling and acclaimed verse.

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In her work, Plath frequently exposes tensions and struggles faced by certain groups in American society. Plath often wrote, “about the social restrictions on individuals,” and “hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the post war period.” Her depiction of the American way of life is clearly negative, and reflects her perspective on the state of American society during the era. By discussing the social restrictions on individuals, Plath exhibits her view that American society limits people from achieving their full potential, directly conflicting with American Dream ideas.

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Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. By the time she took her life at the age of 30, Plath already had a following in the literary community. In the ensuing years her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her singular verse an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion, and obsession with death. In the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates described Plath as "one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English." Intensely autobiographical, Plath's poems explore her own mental anguish, her troubled marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, her unresolved conflicts with her parents, and her own vision of herself. On the World Socialist web site, Margaret Rees observed, "Whether Plath wrote about nature, or about the social restrictions on individuals, she stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the post war period." Oates put it more simply when she wrote that Plath's best-known poems, "many of them written during the final, turbulent weeks of her life, read as if they've been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic ice." Plath has inspired countless readers and influenced many poets since her death in 1963.

In the New York Times Book Review, former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky wrote, "Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open. All the violence in her work returns to that violence of imagination, a frenzied brilliance and conviction." Denis Donoghue made a similar observation, also in the New York Times Book Review: "Plath's early poems, many of them, offered themselves for sacrifice, transmuting agony, 'heart's waste,' into gestures and styles." Donoghue added that "she showed what self-absorption makes possible in art, and the price that must be paid for it, in the art as clearly as in the death." Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote, "At her most articulate, meditating on the nature of poetic inspiration, [Plath] is a controlled voice for cynicism, plainly delineating the boundaries of hope and reality. At her brutal best-and Plath is a brutal poet-she taps a source of power that transforms her poetic voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence."

Born in 1932 in Boston, Plath was the daughter of a German immigrant college professor, Otto Plath, and one of his students, Aurelia Schober. The poet's early years were spent near the seashore, but her life changed abruptly when her father died in 1940. Some of her most vivid poems, including the well-known " Daddy," concern her troubled relationship with her authoritarian father and her feelings of betrayal when he died. Financial circumstances forced the Plath family to move to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Aurelia Plath taught advanced secretarial studies at Boston University. Sylvia Plath was a gifted student who had won numerous awards and had published stories and poetry in national magazines while still in her teens. She attended Smith College on scholarship and continued to excel, winning a Mademoiselle fiction contest one year and garnering a prestigious guest editorship of the magazine the following summer.

It was during her undergraduate years that Plath began to suffer the symptoms of severe depression that would ultimately lead to her death. In one of her journal entries, dated June 20, 1958, she wrote: "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative-whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it." This is an eloquent description of bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, a very serious illness for which no genuinely effective medications were available during Plath's lifetime. In August of 1953, at the age of 20, Plath attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She survived the attempt and was hospitalized, receiving treatment with electro-shock therapy. Her experiences of breakdown and recovery were later turned into fiction for her only published novel, The Bell Jar.

Having made a recovery, Plath returned to Smith for her degree. She earned a Fulbright grant to study at Cambridge University in England, and it was there that she met poet Ted Hughes. The two were married in 1956. Plath published two major works during her lifetime, The Bell Jar and a poetry volume titled The Colossus. Both received warm reviews. However, the end of her marriage in 1962 left Plath with two young children to care for and, after an intense burst of creativity that produced the poems in Ariel, she committed suicide by inhaling gas from a kitchen oven.

Timothy Materer wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "The critical reactions to both The Bell Jar and Ariel were inevitably influenced by the manner of Plath's death at 30." Hardly known outside poetry circles during her lifetime, Plath became in death more than she might have imagined. Donoghue, for one, stated, "I can't recall feeling, in 1963, that Plath's death proved her life authentic or indeed that proof was required. ... But I recall that Ariel was received as if it were a bracelet of bright hair about the bone, a relic more than a book." Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius. Some critics lauded her as a confessional poet whose work "spoke the hectic, uncontrolled things our conscience needed, or thought it needed," to quote Donoghue. Largely on the strength of Ariel, Plath became one of the best-known female American poets of the 20th century.

The writer A. Alvarez, writing in The Savage God, believed that with the poems in Ariel, compiled and published by Hughes, Plath made "poetry and death inseparable. The one could not exist without the other. And this is right. In a curious way, the poems read as though they were written posthumously." Robert Penn Warren called Ariel "a unique book, it scarcely seems a book at all, rather a keen, cold gust of reality as though somebody had knocked out a window pane on a brilliant night." George Steiner wrote, "It is fair to say that no group of poems since Dylan Thomas's Deaths and Entrances has had as vivid and disturbing an impact on English critics and readers as has Ariel. ... Reference to Sylvia Plath is constant where poetry and the conditions of its present existence are discussed." Plath's growing posthumous reputation inspired younger poets to write as she did. But, as Steiner maintained, her "desperate integrity" cannot be imitated. Or, as Peter Davison put it, "No artifice alone could have conjured up such effects." According to McClanahan, the poems in Ariel "are personal testaments to the loneliness and insecurity that plagued her, and the desolate images suggest her apparent fixation with self-annihilation. ... In Ariel, the everyday incidents of living are transformed into the horrifying psychological experiences of the poet."

In Plath's final poems, wrote Charles Newman in his The Art of Sylvia Plath, "death is preeminent but strangely unoppressive. Perhaps it is because there is no longer dialogue, no sense of 'Otherness'-she is speaking from a viewpoint which is total, complete. Love and Death, all rivals, are resolved as one within the irreversibility of experience. To reverse Blake, the Heart knows as much as the Eye sees." Alvarez believed that "the very source of [Plath's] creative energy was, it turned out, her self-destructiveness. But it was, precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power. So, though death itself may have been a side issue, it was also an unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem. My own impression of the circumstances surrounding her eventual death is that she gambled, not much caring whether she won or lost; and she lost."

As a very young poet Plath experimented with the villanelle and other forms. She had been "stimulated" by such writers as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Theodore Roethke, Emily Dickinson, and later by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. She has been linked with Lowell and Sexton as a member of the so-called "confessional" school of poetry. Ted Hughes noted that she shared with them a similar geographical homeland as well as "the central experience of a shattering of the self, and the labour of fitting it together again or finding a new one."

At times, Plath was able to overcome the "tension between the perceiver and the thing-in-itself by literally becoming the thing-in-itself," wrote Newman. "In many instances, it is nature who personifies her." Similarly, Plath used history "to explain herself," writing about the Nazi concentration camps as though she had been imprisoned there. She said, "I think that personal experience shouldn't be a kind of shut box and mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant, to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on." Newman explained that, "in absorbing, personalizing the socio-political catastrophes of the century, [Plath] reminds us that they are ultimately metaphors of the terrifying human mind." Alvarez noted that the "anonymity of pain, which makes all dignity impossible, was Sylvia Plath's subject." Her reactions to the smallest desecrations, even in plants, were "extremely violent," wrote Hughes. "Auschwitz and the rest were merely the open wounds." In sum, Newman believed, Plath "evolved in poetic voice from the precocious girl, to the disturbed modern woman, to the vengeful magician, to Ariel-God's Lioness."

While few critics dispute the power or the substance in Plath's poetry, some have come to feel that its legacy is one of cynicism, ego-absorption, and a prurient fascination with suicide. Donoghue suggested that "the moral claims enforced by these poems now seem exorbitant," adding, "The thrill we get from such poems is something we have no good cause to admire in ourselves." McClanahan felt that Plath's legacy "is one of pain, fear, and traumatic depression, born of the need to destroy the imagistic materialization of ' Daddy.'" Nevertheless, the critic concluded, "The horrifying tone of her poetry underscores a depth of feeling that can be attributed to few other poets, and her near-suicidal attempt to communicate a frightening existential vision overshadows the shaky technique of her final poems. Plath writes of the human dread of dying. Her primitive honesty and emotionalism are her strength." Critics and scholars have continued to write about Plath, and her relationship with Hughes; a reviewer for the National Post reported that in 2000, there were 104 books in print about Plath.

Newman considered The Bell Jar a "testing ground" for Plath's poems. It is, according to the critic, "one of the few American novels to treat adolescence from a mature point of view. ... It chronicles a nervous breakdown and consequent professional therapy in non-clinical language. And finally, it gives us one of the few sympathetic portraits of what happens to one who has genuinely feminist aspirations in our society, of a girl who refuses to be an event in anyone's life. ... [Plath] remains among the few woman writers in recent memory to link the grand theme of womanhood with the destiny of modern civilization." Plath told Alvarez that she published the book under a pseudonym partly because "she didn't consider it a serious work ... and partly because she thought too many people would be hurt by it."

The Bell Jar is narrated by 19-year-old Esther Greenwood. The three-part novel explores Esther's unsatisfactory experiences as a student editor in Manhattan, her subsequent return to her family home, where she suffers a breakdown and attempts suicide, and her recovery with the aid of an enlightened female doctor. One of the novel's themes, the search for a valid personal identity, is as old as fiction itself. The other, a rebellion against conventional female roles, was slightly ahead of its time. Nancy Duvall Hargrove observed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "As a novel of growing up, of initiation into adulthood, [The Bell Jar] is very solidly in the tradition of the Bildungsroman. Technically, The Bell Jar is skillfully written and contains many of the haunting images and symbols that dominate Plath's poetry." Materer commented that the book "is a finely plotted novel full of vivid characters and written in the astringent but engaging style one expects from a poet as frank and observant as Plath. The atmosphere of hospitals and sickness, of incidents of bleeding and electrocution, set against images of confinement and liberation, unify the novel's imagery." Hargrove maintained that the novel is "a striking work which has contributed to [Plath's] reputation as a significant figure in contemporary American literature. ... It is more than a feminist document, for it presents the enduring human concerns of the search for identity, the pain of disillusionment, and the refusal to accept defeat."

Letters Home, a collection of Plath's correspondence between 1950 and 1963, reveals that the source of her inner turmoil was perhaps more accurately linked to her relationship with her mother. The volume, published by Plath's mother in 1975, was intended, at least in part, to counter the angry tone of The Bell Jar as well as the unflattering portrait of Plath's mother contained in that narrative. According to Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker, "The publication of Letters Home had a different effect from the one Mrs. Plath had intended, however. Instead of showing that Sylvia wasn't 'like that,' the letters caused the reader to consider for the first time the possibility that her sick relationship with her mother was the reason she was like that." Though Hughes exercised final editorial approval, the publication of Letters Home also cast a new and unfavorable light on numerous others linked to Plath, including Hughes himself. Malcolm wrote, "Before the publication of Letters Home, the Plath legend was brief and contained, a taut, austere stage drama set in a few bleak, sparsely furnished rooms." Plath's intimate letters to her family contain unguarded personal commentary on her college years, writing, despair, friendships, marriage, and children.

After Plath's death, The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit, a book for children, was also discovered among her papers and published posthumously. The story features Max Nix, a resident of Winkelburg, who happily acquires a modest "woolly, whiskery brand-new mustard-yellow suit." Nicci Gerrard wrote in the Observer, "There's no disturbance in the world of Winkelburg: even Max's desire for a suit is as shallow and clear as the silver stream that runs like a ribbon through the valley." Despite the lasting impression of Plath's bleak art and early death, Gerrard concluded that "small pieces of happiness like this little book remind us of her life."

Plath's relationship with Hughes has long been the subject of commentary, not always flattering to Hughes. Feminist critics in particular tended to see in Plath's suicide a repudiation of the expectations placed upon women in the early 1960s. Further criticism attended Hughes's guardianship of Plath's papers, especially when Hughes admitted that he destroyed some of Plath's journals, including several written just prior to her suicide. Materer felt that Hughes's control over Plath's papers-a right he exercised only because their divorce had not become final-caused "difficulties" for both critics and biographers. Materer added, "The estate's strict control of copyright and its editing of such writings as Plath's journals and letters have caused the most serious problems for scholars."

Since Hughes's death from cancer in 1998, a new edition of Plath's journals has been published, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962.This exact transcription of the poet's journals, from her earliest days at Smith College to the days of her marriage, has been published verbatim, down to her misspellings. "Uncritical admirers of Plath will find much here that is fascinating," noted Oates. "Other readers may find much that is fascinating and repellent in equal measure." Oates concluded, "Like all unedited journals, Plath's may be best read piecemeal, and rapidly, as they were written. The reader is advised to seek out the stronger, more lyric and exhilarating passages, which exist in enough abundance through these many pages to assure that this presumed final posthumous publication of Sylvia Plath's is that rarity, a genuine literary event worthy of the poet's aggressive mythopoetic claim in ' Lady Lazarus '-Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air."

Hughes once summarized Plath's unique personality and talent: "Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them. In her poetry, in other words, she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans and Holymen." The poet continued, "Surveyed as a whole ... I think the unity of her opus is clear. Once the unity shows itself, the logic and inevitability of the language, which controls and contains such conflagrations and collisions within itself, becomes more obviously what it is-direct, and even plain, speech. This language, this unique and radiant substance, is the product of an alchemy on the noblest scale. Her elements were extreme: a violent, almost demonic spirit in her, opposed a tenderness and capacity to suffer and love things infinitely, which was just as great and far more in evidence. Her stormy, luminous senses assaulted a downright practical intelligence that could probably have dealt with anything. ... She saw her world in the flame of the ultimate substance and the ultimate depth. And this is the distinction of her language, that every word is Baraka: the flame and the rose folded together. Poets have often spoken about this ideal possibility but where else, outside these poems, has it actually occurred? If we have the discrimination to answer this question, we can set her in her rightful company."

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Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. By the time she took her life at the age of 30, Plath already had a following in the literary community. In the ensuing years her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her singular verse an...