Sylvia Plath

Freak! of the Week

Early Life

Born October 27th, 1932 in Boston

Her mother was Aurelia Schober Plath and her father

Otto Emile Plath.

In 1936 the family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts.

While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath

published her first poem in the Boston Herald's children's section.

Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half

after Plath's eighth birthday.

Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's

death, and remained undecided about religion throughout her

life.

Aurelia Plath moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley,

Massachusetts in 1942.

Plath attended Bradford Senior High School in

Wellesley, graduating in 1950.

CollegeIn 1950, Plath attended Smith

College.

She edited The Smith Review and during the summer after her third year of college.

Awarded the coveted position of guest editor at

Mademoiselle magazine, and spent a month in NYC.

The experience was her inspiration for The Bell Jar.

She was rejected for admission to the Harvard

writing seminar.

Made her first medically documented suicide attempt in

late August, 1953.

She spent the next six months in psychiatric care.

She spent the next six months in psychiatric care.

Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college and in June, 1955,

she graduated from Smith with highest class honors.

She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge.

She continued actively writing poetry and publishing

her work in the student newspaper Varsity.

At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook.

She spent her first year winter and spring holidays

travelling around the continent.

MarriagePlath met Ted Hughes in Cambridge at a party.

A few months later the couple were married on June 16, 1956

at St George the Martyr Holborn in the London Borough

of Camden.

They both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using Ouija

boards.

Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the US, staying at the Yaddo artist colony in New York State in

the Autumn of 1959.

Their daughter Frieda was born on 1st April, 1960.

The couple moved back to the United Kingdom in December 1959 and lived in London.

In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in

miscarriage.

In that August that family moved to Court Green in the town of North Tawton in

Devon.

Her son Nicholas was born in January 1962.

In 1961, the couple rented their flat in Chalcot Square to Assia and David Wevill.

Hughes was immediately struck with the beautiful Assia.

In June Plath had had a car accident which she described

as one of many suicide attempts.

In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes had been having an affair with Wevill and in September the couple

separated.

In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children, and rented a flat on a five year lease in a house where William Butler

Yeats once lived.

The winter of 1962 was one of the coldest in 100 years; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone; her

depression returned.

CareerIn 1957 Plath taught at Smith

College, her alma mater.

In 1958 Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General

Hospital and in the evening took creative writing

seminars given by poet Robert Lowell.

In October, 1960, Plath published her first

collection of poetry, The Colossus and in August she finished the Bell Jar.

During the summer of 1962, Hughes began to keep bees,

which would be the subject of many Plath poems.

Beginning in October 1962, Plath wrote most of her poems for the collection Ariel, which her reputation now

rests upon.

Her depression returned but she completed the rest of her poetry collection which would be published after her death in 1965. The Bell Jar came

out in January 1963, published under the pen name

Victoria Lucas.

StyleHer works weren’t really

appreciated until after her death.

Themes of feminist criticism.

Unique uses of rhythm and meter.

Her earlier poems were composed slowly and with

great care, while her later poems were written at a

greater and increasing speed.

She uses the technique of "doubling," and has

distinctive approach to characterization.

Plath would speak these poems in "her own voice" as she

wrote them.

She handled very painful and intense subjects such as suicide, self-loathing, Nazis, shock treatment,

dysfunctional relationships, and homicidal iron tanks.

The syntactic and visual irregularities together create an unsettling

experience.

The controlled flow of images

combined with the structure of these poems successfully draws the reader

into that suffering.

The use of parody and black humor rescues her

poetry from total pathos.

FREAKShe was obsessed with death.

Her first suicide attempt was at the age of 20 while she was attending school in

Cambridge by sleeping pills.

Her 2nd suicide attempt was right before she found out Hughes was having an affair with Assia, by auto crash.

Her 3rd, and successful, suicide attempt was by CO poisoning, dying with her

head in the oven.

She dealt with ongoing depression and was checked into hospitals and seeing psychiatrists on and off throughout her life.

Her son committed suicide in 2009, which suggests that

their depression was genetically based.

Her poems deal with heavy subjects like suicide, self

dissatisfaction, and unhappiness in relationships.

The MirrorI am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.What ever you see I swallow immediatelyJust as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.I am not cruel, only truthful---The eye of a little god, four-cornered.Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so longI think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.Faces and darkness separate us over and over.Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,Searching my reaches for what she really is.Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.I am important to her. She comes and goes.Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old womanRises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

The Mirror is a poem about the difficulty of accepting the truth, especially the inevitable process of age and time. The poem is characterized from the perspective of the mirror itself with the relationship of one specific woman. When the mirror describes itself as “a little god” it personifies its powerful ego and also like it enjoys the power if has over the woman. In the second stanza the mirror transforms into a lake and the importance of this transformation is that a lake isn’t as exact as mirror; a lake involves more depth. She refers to the candles and moon as liars because they do not give off enough light to reveal a true reflection. The woman feels as though she has been lied to by the lake when the last two lines of the poem. The woman is afraid that one day the lake and the mirror will one day reflect the exact same image; the mirror reflects a physical appearance of the girl with her beauty and the because you have to look deeper into the lake, it reflects who the girl really is on the inside. By this the girl feels conflicted and confused about who she really is. One of the most important messages that Sylvia Plath is trying to get across is that beauty is nice, but superficial. She is sending a message to the growing superficiality of today’s society and tells us that beauty is nice but soon fades and the only thing you have left to yourself is your character. This poem was written in 1961, not too long after she found out that her husband, Ted Hughes, was having an affair on her with Assia Wevill, who caught Ted’s attention by her beauty. I believe this poem reflects the despair of Sylvia and how much she was actually hurt by her husband’s affair with someone who had no depth to compliment her beauty. Sylvia was also aging at the time, and her husband’s affair messed with her head making her search for who she really was and maybe trying to figure out what her husband didn’t see in her that she saw in Wevill, contemplating on which one really mattered more, beauty or character.