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Plath’s Problems It is a well-known fact that Sylvia Plath struggled with depression throughout her lifetime. Her poems were an outlet for the many psychological issues that consumed her; for example, she struggled with her paternity as the daughter of a German man, as well as balancing motherhood and her career as an esteemed author and her turbulent love life. A biographical reading of the poems, “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Child,” and “Morning Song,” reveals the deeper psychological framework that fueled the writing of these poems. Although it is known that Plath struggled with depression as an adult with choosing between being a mother and an esteemed author, an article from poetryfoundations.org showed that her journey with depression did not start there. Plath first felt the pang of depression that stemmed from her father’s family during her junior year of high school. Her mother sought out a treatment plan, and she was given bi-polar electroconvulsive shock treatments as an out-patient which resulted in her first attempt at suicide shortly after in August of 1953. This attempt then hospitalized, her and she received electroshock therapy for treatment (par. 3). She then took a six-month break from her education for intensive therapy and later resumed her usual academic achievements as a senior where she received the Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge University (Wagner-Martin). While studying in England, Plath met fellow poet Ted Hughes. Shortly after meeting, Plath and Hughes married and moved back to the states; but their marriage was short lived. Plath and Hughes separated in 1962, leaving Plath as a single mother of two children, encyclopedia.com stated that “the drive to self-destruction that had intermittently

Holtkamp 2! haunted her throughout her life, intensified” (par.1). This is when Plath’s depression hit her the hardest and drove her to suicide in 1963 shortly thereafter. Plath is known for using her writing, specifically poetry, to express her inner psychological problems; she is essentially crying out for help in these poems. She used this tactic to deal with her inner demons right up until her suicide. One of her two most talked about topics was the idea of being pregnant and being a domestic wife and mother as opposed to her career as a successful poet. These were the topics of some of her darkest works. Although Plath appeared to have conflicted with these ideals throughout her life, it seemed as if she changed her perspective of not wanting a husband and children to feeling like she needed to be married in a short span of just a few years. In an article from writingwomen.org from Megan Jenson, Plath was quoted as saying, “I don’t know how I can bear to go back to the states unless I am married” (par. 2). This may be accredited to the idea the Plath may have thought society would reject and criticize her status as a woman if she chose not to become a wife and mother. In the end, Plath married fellow poet Ted Hughes, and thus began some of her biggest issues. Even as Plath married Hughes and gave him two children, she continued to pursue her writing career while still putting it on the back burner to assist Hughes in his own career. “Plath and Hughes’ marriage was stormy and rife with jealousy and conflict” (encyclopedia.com par. 1). She “wanted to have it all” but suffered because of it. Plath thought the role of being a mother was a burden. It was stated that Plath felt that her children hindered her work. It could also be assumed that her children were the roots for some of her most famous poems such as “Morning Song” and “Child” where she explores her darkest thoughts on the issue itself.

Holtkamp 3! She [Plath] seems to dissolve the myth of all women being naturally embracing of motherhood. Plath reveals the dark truth that some mothers face – motherhood, pregnancy, and childbirth can be terrifying prospects that leave some women feeling trapped, isolated, and resentful, especially if they have had to give up on their careers by becoming mothers (Jenson). Plath laid out her inner demons that completely contradicted her external appearance as well as led onto some pressures that “hovered just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the post war period” (poetryfoundation.org par. 7). Additionally, Plath “[…] let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears” (poetryfoundation.org par. 8) that were not acceptable in her day and age as a young woman, wife, and mother. Plath’s poem “Morning Song” is considered a work of confessional poetry, where the poet reveals her personal problems in considerably blunt way. Plath wrote “Morning Song” shortly after her daughter Frieda was born. This poem begins with the word “love” but love is the last thing that a reader feels. An analysis of this poem shows that the mother does not feel love or a connection for her child until after the labor and pain has subsided, and even then the so called connection takes a while to form. Another word for morning song is aubade which typically is an expression of love, like a mother hearing their baby’s voice for the first time (Merriam-webster.com); in “Morning Song,” Plath rejects this idea and depicts the morning song as something that is anything but pleasant to the mother. This is where you can see Plath struggle over the idea of being a mother. Her maternal instincts are not automatic. In fact, she describes it as if she feels alienated from her own child (bachelorandmaster.com) “I am no more

Holtkamp 4! your mother than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind’s hand” (1418). In the next stanza, it seems as if Plath is finally feeling the maternal instincts set in, “All night your moth-breath flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: a far sea moves in my ear” (1418). Here you can feel that the mother’s emotions have changed towards her child from earlier in the poem. In the beginning, her poem “Child” sings a different tune of being a mother. It seems as if in this poem, the mother has those maternal instincts and feels connected to their child, “Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing. I want to fill it with color and ducks, the zoo of the new” (1423); Plath is talking about all the amazing opportunities that she wants her child to have in their life as well as the love that she has for him or her. She also sits and thinks about her child’s perfection, “Stalk without wrinkle, pool I which images should be grand and classical” (1424). Although towards the end, the feeling of the poem changes to that of the disinterested mother and the stress that she feels for her child and what they potentially have to face in their future, “Not this troublous wringing of hands, this dark ceiling without a star” (1424); this is where she brings up her own life and past, as well as current struggles. On the other hand, as the daughter of a German immigrant and college professor, Sylvia Plath dealt with many struggles relating to her paternity and even more so when her father died in 1940 when Plath was just eight years old (history.com). Otto Plath had been a strict father, and his authoritative attitude and death were the defining aspects of her relationships with men and the inspiration of some of her most famous poems (poets.org). She had a “troubled relationship with her authoritarian father and feelings of betrayal when he died” (poetryfoundation.org par. 2). Otto Plath was also described as a “morbid man with

Holtkamp 5! possible pro-German sympathies during World War II” (poets.org). These feelings and struggles that consumed her life, just as her struggle with being a mother, were also made into two more of her most famous poems, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” where she let her true and darkest feelings speak. Plath’s feelings of oppression from being the daughter of a German man are essentially what inspired her to write her poems “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” where she describes her life and struggles with the issue and compares it to a life of an imprisoned Jew in a Nazi internment camp during World War II. Plath believed that the only way to become an independent self was to kill her father’s memory; she achieves this with a metaphorical murder of him in her poem “Daddy”, “Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time” (1421). IN an article from English.illionois.edu Robert Phillips discussed how Plath inherently depicts her father as a Nazi soldier and herself as a Jew (Phillips); “I have always been scared of you, with your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook. And your neat mustache and your Aryan eye, bright blue, panzer-man, panzer-man, O you – not God but a swastika so black no sky could squeak through” (1422) and “every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you” (1422). Prior to her metaphorical murder of her father, Plath refers to how she used to wish for her father to return back to life, “I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du” (1421). In this poem Plath describes her failed attempt at suicide and how she married someone like her father, referring to ex-husband Ted Hughes, “I made a model of you, a man in black with a Meinkampf look” (1422). In an analysis of “Daddy”, it was said that “when she drives the stake through her father’s heart, she not only is exercising the demon of her father’s memory, but metaphorically is killing her husband and all men” off as well (Phillips). Plath describes how she could not speak

Holtkamp 6! up, even to her father, because she was always scared, just as a Jew would be while living in an internment camp “So I never could tell where you put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw…I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene” (1421). Margaret Dickie from English.illinois.edu wrote about how Plath’s poem, “Lady Lazarus”, can be considered a “companion poem” (Dickie par. 1) to “Daddy”. This poem references her suicide attempt, the same as she had before, as well as the entourage of people that rush in to see. “I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it…And I am a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die…what a million filaments. The peanut crunching crowd shoves in to see them unwrap me hand and foot – the big strip tease…dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well” (1418-1419). And again, here Plath compares her suffering through her struggles to that of the tortured Jews, “A sort of walking miracle, my skin bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot a paperweight, my face a featureless, fine Jew linen” (1418). Lastly, Plath reduces the status of men here just the same as in “Daddy”, “Ash, ash – you poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there” (1420). Here Plath is immanently degrading the status of men in her world. She reduces them to nothing more than flesh and bone; “there is nothing there” (1420). This seems to be a popular topic of choice for Plath considering her own personal history with men: her father and husband. Sylvia Plath clearly did not live an easy life. Between her turbulent marriage, depression, and struggle with being a mother over her career on top of her feelings of betrayal toward her

Holtkamp 7! father, it is tragic yet not completely surprising that her life ended the way it did. Despite all of these inner psychological demons, Plath has gone down in history as one of America’s finest poets. She inspired a new generation of female poets to follow in her footsteps (Ney), and some of her most turbulent life experiences gave us some of her most beautiful and well written pieces. Though when her life ended tragically with her head in an oven, her legacy continues to influence new authors and poets, as well as generations of students and scholars who continue to study and learn from her life and works.

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Works Cited “Aubade.” Merriam Webster Dictionary. Merriam-webster.com. Web. 17 April. 2016. "Daddy by Sylvia Plath: Critical Analysis." Daddy by Sylvia Plath: Critical Analysis. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

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Dickie, Margaret. “On Lady Lazarus.” 1979. English.illinois.edu. Web. 17 April 2016. Encyclopedia.com. HighBeam Research, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2016. . Jensen, Megan. "Sylvia Plath and Motherhood: By Liam Doheny Group B."Writingwomendotorg. N.p., 14 Nov. 2013. Web. 17 Apr. 2016

"Morning Song by Sylvia Plath: Critical Analysis." Morning Song by Sylvia Plath: Critical Analysis. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

. Ney, Jason. Lecture. 7 April 2016. Phillips, Robert. “On Daddy.” 1972. English.illinois.edu. Web. 17 April 2016. Plath, Sylvia. “Child.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature Shorter 8th Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. England: London, 2013. 1423-1424. Print

Holtkamp 9! Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature Shorter 8th Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. England: London, 2013. 1421-1423. Print Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature Shorter 8th Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. England: London, 2013. 1418-1420. Print Plath, Sylvia. “Morning Song.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature Shorter 8th Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. England: London, 2013. 1418. Print. "Sylvia Plath." Poets.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2016. "Sylvia Plath." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2016. "Sylvia Plath Is Born." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2016. Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Two Views of Plath’s life and Career.” 1995. English.illinois.edu. Web. 17 April 2016....