The mythologized Plath has long been subject to ludicrous debates about the role her poetry played in her death, with prominent poets and critics, Hughes among them, arguing that the poems of Ariel were responsible for her death. Clark resists this suggestion admirably. In other words, poetry and novel writing did not, as it has too often been claimed, kill Sylvia Plath.
Depression did. The woman they had come to know and love was normally fastidiously put together, a bright, funny conversationalist. Red Comet gives us a nuanced discussion of the role class played in her childhood in the affluent suburb of Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Plath was raised by a widowed single mother; she lived in a small home with her mother, brother, and maternal grandparents. Her grandfather was the head waiter at a local country club who boarded there during the week to save money and time. While this is not new territory, what differs is how Red Comet places Plath squarely in context. In the past, Plath has often been read and written about as anomalous, a mad poet fallen from a cold star to land briefly among the living.
Red Comet insists on her as a woman of her time. Some Plath biographies leave the reader with the impression that Plath was at all times grimly cerebral, living miserably in her head until her inevitable death. But her best critic, strange to say, was Ted Hughes. Hughes on Plath is irresistible, not merely because he was a genius writing about a genius, but because the force propelling his prose is love.
In the letters and essays that he wrote about his dead wife, Hughes responded to her work with a binocular combination of spousal sympathy and undomesticated awe. There is also a child desperately infatuated with the world. In visions and maledictions, and weird singsong, the poems straggle across the page like disemboweled nursery rhymes. That is that. Haloed with fatigue, she aimed herself straight at the unthinkable.
They are carbon monoxide. Some kind of terminus confronts her: a magnetic white deadness, fury at the freezing point. She survived and spent the next six months receiving intensive psychiatric care. Olive Higgins Prouty, an author who had successfully rebounded from a mental breakdown, paid for her hospital stay and her scholarships, and eventually, Plath was able to recover, graduate from Smith with highest honors, and win a Fulbright Scholarship to Newnham College, one of the all-female colleges at Cambridge.
In February , Plath met Ted Hughes, a fellow poet whose work she admired, while they were both at the University of Cambridge. After a whirlwind courtship, during which they frequently wrote poems to each other, they married in London in June In , after her marriage to Hughes, Plath and her husband moved back to the United States, and Plath began teaching at Smith.
Her teaching duties, however, left her with little time to actually write, which frustrated her. It was there that she first began to develop what would become her signature writing style. Lowell, along with fellow poet Anne Sexton , encouraged Plath to draw more from her personal experiences in her writing.
Sexton wrote in a highly personal confessional poetry style and in a distinctively female voice; her influence helped Plath to do the same. Plath began to more openly discuss her depression and even her suicide attempts, particularly with Lowell and Sexton.
She began working on more serious projects and began considering her writing more professionally and seriously around this time. While at the colony, which served as a retreat for writers and artists to nurture creative pursuits without interruptions from the outside world and while among other creative people, Plath began to slowly feel more comfortable about the weirder and darker ideas she was drawn to.
Even so, she had yet to completely broach the deeply personal, private material that she had been encouraged to draw upon. At the end of , Plath and Hughes returned to England, where they had met, and settled in London.
Plath was pregnant at the time , and their daughter, Frieda Plath, was born in April In , her first full collection, The Colossus and Other Poems , was published. The Colossus was first released in the UK, where it was met with significant praise.
All of the poems in the collection had previously been published individually. In , the collection received a U. It was semi-autobiographical in nature, but it included enough information about her own life that her mother attempted—unsuccessfully—to block its publication. In essence, the novel compiled incidents from her own life and added fictional elements to it in order to explore her mental and emotional state. The Bell Jar tells the story of Esther, a young woman who gets a chance to work at a magazine in New York City but struggles with mental illness.
Issues of mental illness and treatment are everywhere in the novel, shedding some light on the way it was treated and how Plath herself might have been treated. Her experiences in the publishing industry exposed her to many bright, hard-working women who were perfectly capable of being writers and editors but were only permitted to do secretarial work.
In , she became pregnant again but suffered a miscarriage; she wrote several poems about the devastating experience. Soon after, Plath tried to kill herself by taking sleeping pills.
She eventually recovered, having received treatment during a stay in a mental health facility. Plath returned to Smith and finished her degree in While studying at the university's Newnham College, she met the poet Ted Hughes. The two married in and had a stormy relationship. In , Plath spent time in Massachusetts to study with poet Robert Lowell and met fellow poet and student Ann Sexton. She also taught English at Smith College around that same time. Plath returned to England in A poet on the rise, Plath had her first collection of poetry, The Colossus , published in England in That same year, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Freida.
Two years later, Plath and Hughes welcomed a second child, a son named Nicholas. Unfortunately, the couple's marriage was falling apart.
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