SYLVIA PLATH

Sixty years since her death, and Sylvia Plath continues to intrigue and mystify our modern-day literary world. But despite being one of the most influential and famous poets of the modern age, the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ of literature has been defined by her suicide, at age 30.

Since her death, Plath and her opus have been posthumously psychoanalysed under every conceivable lens; with more than a dozen biographies attempting to disentangle her art from her life, and learn who the ‘real’ Sylvia Plath was.

However, as with Virginia Woolf who also died by suicide, everything Plath did and created in her life has became part of her death-driven narrative, her suicide underscoring the interpretations of her poems and novels. By contrast, when a male author dies prematurely, it is a tragic end to his creative output. We mourn Dylan Thomas, who died aged 39, and the poems he never wrote, but distinct from his self-destructive lifestyle. His work is celebrated in spite of, rather than because of, his troubled life and alcoholism.

However, despite this, Plath’s work has achieved exceptional cultural longevity. Dubbed in the 70s as a feminist martyr, her name is synonymous with a renaissance in feminism. Her singular novel, The Bell Jar, has become a defining work of the feminist canon, facilitated by pop culture’s tight embrace of the work as a symbol of female sadness. Characters such as Maeve, in Netflix’s recent Sex Education, are seen holding the book as a prop, symbolic of the girl who rejects conventional standards of femininity. And more widely, it is used as a visual shorthand for a troubled or ostracised female character, rebellious and willing to take her life into her own hands. And thus, the decidedly unromantic novel, depicting a young woman prescribed electroconvulsive therapy to cure her psychosis, who suffers depressive episode during which she starves herself and is insomniatic, has been romanticised as the quintessential literary companion for young females.

And yet, after all these years, we cannot let the mythos of Plath go.

The multiplicity of her persona fuels an industry, evidenced by the stream of biographies, memoirs, films and literature, striving to understand a figure distorted by time and cultural imagination. In the wake of Plath’s death and the growing celebrity of her figure, much of her work was edited, portraying an image of the poet favourable to a century notoriously tight-lipped about the realities of mental illness, particularly among women. In Sylvia’s Letters Home, the edited correspondence between ‘Sivvy’ and her mother, Aurelia, the letters depict a one-dimensional, doting daughter. This is far removed from reality, where Aurelia was “ashamed of [Plath’s] mental illness” and keen to alter her depiction as the mother who is cruel taskmaster in The Bell Jar. It wasn’t until the release of Plath’s unabridged journals and second book of poetry Ariel, two decades after her death, that Plath was represented again, with her own, unedited voice.

Now, sixty years after her death, Plath’s work continues evolve and develop new meanings, as academic discourse transitions from the traditional feminist focus to how her works reflect the dissonance Plath felt as an American in England, and the contemporary shame attached to her mental illness, in an era where mental health was not prioritised or understood.

Ultimately, Plath’s death is a small part of her incredible life. She is likely always to remain a puzzle, in part due to her premature death, which means she never got a chance to tell her story on her own terms. And while we may honour Plath upon the anniversary of her death, we should also celebrate her life, lived fiercely and unapologetically, and the way in which it reaches out to others.

Sophie D (U6M)