Brief Biography of Sylvia Plath's Life Her suicide attempts Holocaust Imagery in her work Lady Lazarus

2. Sylvia Plath: A Suicide Artist
Biography and Major Turmoils
Bibi Halima
Bibi.halima@uow.edu.pk
University of Wah
6th November, 2019

3. Introduction
Sylvia Plath was an influential poetess who wrote more
than four hundred poems. Her poems are known for
their dark tone and disturbing imagery, which was due
to her tendency to become depressed.
• I am made breathless by emotional vigor that is crafted by the writer
to become calm, controlled, directed, and clear in its message.
Frieda Hughes on Ariel, in Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, ‘P.S.’ section, 5.

4. [. . .] when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a
child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally,
as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come
along and blown them askew.
Plath, The Bell Jar, 125.

5. Sylvia Plath, ‘Triple-Face Portrait’ (1950-51)
What she presents us with [. . .] is not only the difference of
writing from the person who produces it, but also the division
internal to language, the difference of writing from itself. It is
then all the more striking that so many critics have felt it
incumbent upon themselves to produce a unified version of
Plath as a writer and as a woman, as if that particular form of
fragmentation or indirect representation were something
which, through the completion of their own analysis of her,
they could somehow repair.
Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 2nd edn.
(London: Virago, 1996), 5.

6. A brief biography: childhood
• Born in Boston on October 27, 1932, to
Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath
• Idolised her father and longed to please him
• In 1940, when Sylvia was 8, her father died
and she published her first poem.
• Her mother introduced her to poetry which
she loved
After discovering poetry,
Sylvia said I “had fallen
into a new way of being
happy.”

7. Sylvia Plath as a young
woman
• At school she was a top student, excelling in
English
• Suffers mental and emotional exhaustion
• Is rejected for a Harvard writing course
• First suicide attempt –overdose. Receives electric
shock treatment.
• She writes about these experiences in her semi-
autobiographical novel The Bell Jar
“I still do not know myself. Perhaps I
never will. I am afraid of getting older. I
am afraid of getting married…I want, I
think, to be omniscient…I think I would
like to call myself the girl who wanted to
be God. . . . Never, never, will I reach the
perfection I long for with all my soul. . .
.” (diary, age 17)

8. Sylvia goes to England
• Wins a Fulbright Scholarship to England
• 1956 She met Ted Hughes, a poet, at a
Cambridge University party
• It was an intense courtship and they were
married within months.
He was “very simply the only
man I’ve ever met whom I could
never boss.” (Sylvia to friends)

9. Motherhood and Writing
• Sylvia and her husband return to
England and begin writing full-time
• In 1960 Plath had her first child, Frieda,
and published her first book of poetry,
‘The Colossus’.
• In 1962, following a traumatic appendix
operation and the birth of their son
Nicholas, Plath's writing became more
frantic.

10. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
• Sylvia & Ted’s relationship was passionate
and tumultuous
• She was attracted to his physical power, his
way with animals esp owls, his reputation
as a poet, and appreciated his
encouragement of her poetry
• She feared losing him
1962 – the beginning of the end
• June: 2nd suicide attempt – driving car
off the road
• July: Discovers Ted’s affair with Assia
Weevill.
• Sept: They get separated
• Oct: She writes 26 poems in one
month
• Dec: She takes her 2 children and
moves into a maisonette in London
• She prepares Ariel, a collection of 41
poems

11. The End: 1963
• The Bell Jar is published under a pseudonym
and receives good reviews
• She is depressed, isolated and mentally
unstable
• February 1963, in one of the coldest winters in
English history, she succeeded in taking her life
• Her body was discovered the following
morning.
• 1965: Ariel was published.
• 1982 she is posthumously awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

12. Suicide Attempts (1)
Sylvia Plath lost her father when she was 8 years old which had a very
intense impact on her as well as her writings as she later wrote. Plath
had a series of mental illness and depression since childhood and had
been treated with electroconvulsive therapy. Sylvia Plath made her
first medically documented suicide attempt in late August 1953 when
she was 20 years old. She took the sleeping pills from her mother's
cabinet and then went to the basement of her house. She survived
this first suicide attempt and was under intensive care for 6 months,
later writing in one of her poems 'Daddy‘
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.

13. Suicide Attempts (2)
In 1956, she married Ted Hughes. He
was a poet as well. They had two
children, a daughter and a son.
In June 1962, she had a car accident
that looked like a suicide attempt. In
July 1962, she found out that Ted was
having an affair. They separated soon
after and she lived with their two
children in London. Plath was
constantly and severely depressed
but experienced a great burst of
creativity and wrote many of her
great poems in this period.

14. In 1963, Sylvia Plath consulted her GP
complaining of her depressed and for the
first time told him about his serious
suicidal attempt. She was triggered by
serious mental crises by her doctor.

15. Suicide Attempts (3)
On 11th February, 1963, she was
found dead in her kitchen. Her
children were in the bedroom. She
had her head in the oven and the gas
turned on.

16. The speaker [of ‘Lady Lazarus’] is a woman who has the great and
terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first.
She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also
just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.
Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, 196.

17. Holocaust Imagery in
her work
In all her works, she equates her sufferings and turmoil with
the sufferings of Jews who were utterly victimized by Nazi
Germans in Holocaust (1941-45)