If we go by psychoanalytic theories, they prove that an artist has the capability to plunder deep into his subconscious mind but then he comes back to the normal world. The same is not in the case of Sylvia Plath. She didn't come back and finally committed suicide.
This gifted woman was torn between her brilliance as a writer and the agony which the adultery of her husband brought her. Subsequently, Hughes' mistress committed suicide and took their young daughter with her,(she was convinced Hughes would not take care of his daughter born out of wedlock). Since suicide runs in families, it is no surprise that her Plath and Hughes' son Nicolas also committed suicide. There is a riveting biography of Sylvia Plath's life available. I really do not believe Plath was psychotic - I believe she was in great pain.
that's right .. she was psychotic but according to the terms of the patriarchal society !!! in a world that creates fitters and barriers in the face of intelligent woman, it is only the breaking of these patriarchal values that would give woman the freedom of expression but again they will be farmed as psychotic and unfit for logical thinking !!
to grasp the poetry of Sylvia Plath the best, i suggest reading her poems in the light of Kristeva's The Semiotic and the Symbolic as these psychotic fits of Plath are the dispositions of the semiotic drives and emotions inside her . regards
Forget about theory - I prefer a woman's quite human response to a husband who happens to be a philanderer of the worst kind - how could he not care about his children - his toddlers? He abandoned them. He was too busy with his mistress - appalling - and perhaps in the end, his mistress understood this too which is why she took her daughter with her when she committed suicide.
She was a bit mad. But there is always some reason in madness. It was that reason which was coming forth in her poetry. After all NO great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. Ans seeing her life and her trauma;can you blame her.
Thank you, yes, I believe this. I try to look through the lens of empathy, as you have done. I know Sylvia had episodes of clinical depression prior to her marriage to Ted Hughes and Hughes was crushed by her suicide. It is just that placing labels often omits an individual's personal trauma.
It's not the case that Sylvia Plath was psychotic (never mind that it was "clinically proven"). She was clearly seriously depressed at times, like many women of her generation, but that's a long way from psychosis. And she did "come back" from her bouts of depression--seriously depressed people don't have the energy or initiative to write magnificent poems, or any poems. (Funny, Robert Lowell had a mental illness that did lead to occasional psychotic episodes, but no one ever asks such questions about him!) I don't know if your question would survive the discovery that Planth was not psychotic, but if a deeper question remains--like "how could someone so well acquainted with despair write such beautiful poetry?"--I have a couple of suggestions: on the phenomenon of the mystified Plath legend, Jacqueline Rose (a brilliant reader of poetry, with a psychoanalytic orientation you might like), "The Haunting of Sylvia Plath," and on Plath as a poet vitally interested in the world around her Tracy Brain, "The Other Sylvia Plath." May your enjoyment of this extraordinary writer only flourish!
Plath in her poetry seems , to me at least, so composed that I find it challenging to see her output coming from the recess of her agonized self, unlike, say Emily Dickinson. This of course does not deny Plath's sensitivity, but it rather shows a writing practice and will of erecting a sort of barrier between her emotional states and poetry. She is hardly "confessional" to me!
I think this needs to be a discussion on what is or is not madness. Also, how much pain was in her writings? She was part of the confessional style of poetry developed by Robert Lowell, but her famous poem Daddy, while it might reference her authoritarian father, also diagnoses authoritarian natures and systems and political and social effects of distorted masculinity. The rationality of her symbolic thinking triumphs over authoritarian assumptions of rationality and rightness. Her work is a paen against masculine power!
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