Feminism and Sylvia Plath

Date: December 28, 2024

I recently did research on Sylvia Plath, one of the most influential American women writers of the 20th century. She greatly influenced American women’s culture as she was one of the first people to delve into depressive memoirs, and especially while projecting a female perspective onto them. 

To fully understand Plath’s motivation for writing and how it impacted literature, its important to understand her childhood and life story. Plath’s father died when she was 8, therefore forcing her mother to raise her alone. Plath described her relationship with her mother as overprotective and confining. These themes of feeling enclosed and having a lost relationship with her father emerge consistently throughout her poetry.

Plath’s writings focussed a lot on struggles of women who are being pressured to choose nurturing children and fostering a family over pursuing their career, a conflict she struggled with herself. It’s also commonly assumed that Plath’s poetry was autobiographical. While she would consider herself a confessional poet, her personal poems were actually used as metaphors for political ongoings at the time. This is shown in one of Plath’s most famous writings, the Bell Jar, a story in which a woman yearns for more success and achievement through a new job but when she is consistently shown that what was previously important to her is proved meaningless and treated as unimportant, eventually commits suicide. This story relates closely to and was based on Plath’s early life, but she only wrote the book almost 10 years later. In fact, the story of the Bell Jar related so closely to Plath’s real-life experiences that she published the book under a pseudonym to maintain the privacy of those she mentioned in her novel.

In the summer of 1953, Plath, then an undergrad at Smith College, faced severe mental breakdowns while struggling to complete her thesis. During this time, she experienced profound feelings of isolation and pressure, and wrote in her journals that she felt that she couldn’t even read a book, leading to a severe state of depression. Plath was soon after given a type of shock therapy which was a common treatment at the time, but impacted her greatly in further years. 

After graduating from Smith, She went to Cambridge, and there Plath met her future husband, Ted Hughes, another famous poet at the time. Hughes' career is important to note in the story of Sylvia Plath since his popularity and career was increasing exceedingly fast during the time that Plath was taking care of their two children. She ended up doing all his publications, but despite publishing her first collection of poetry in 1960, his career took off more successfully than hers, causing innumerous stressors along with the burden of raising children without help from her working husband.

Amongst angst of raising her children alone, a failing career, and previous traumas, she begins to reach deeper emotional trenches in her writing which lets her expose her raw and vulnerable emotions in the most straightforward way possible. This is also around the time when she comes up with the idea for the bell jar. 

Plath’s past trauma from the shock therapy and her poor relationship with her mother eventually resurfaces partly due to the darker themes she begins to write about. This becomes a period of intense personal turmoil including themes of depression and the quest for identity which appear in her poetry and prose. The shock therapy in 1953, left her so traumatized and terrified that she feared that she’d be institutionalized in a psych ward, and ended up attempting to commit suicide in 1963.

After she died, her husband and sister in law published the rest of her poetry in a different order than what she had intended for. 

When she was alive, Plath wasn’t recognized for paving a new path into exploring themes of death, suicide, and depressive memoirs that no other poet, especially female poet, had ventured thorugh before. Apart from Emily Dickinson, most poetry by female authors were expected to have a feminine voice and mention gentler topics in a more passive tone. Plath’s poetry has a lacerating edge to it that pioneered deep and blunt emotional intensity in poetry for generations to come.