SYLVIA PLATH
Being married to Ted Hughes may not have been the best thing for Sylvia’s mental health. He left her for another woman – Assia Gutmann Wevill who, incidentally, also committed suicide (as did Sylvia…they both gassed themselves) but did one better than Plath by also killing their daughter} was slovenly (he rarely bathed), had a penchant for nosepicking in public, and was notoriously moody. Their tumultuous relationship can best be exemplified by their very first meeting at a student party (Newnham College, 1956); Hughes kissed her hard on the mouth and Sylvia bit him even harder on the cheek, drawing blood. According to Plath, they had fights “in which I come out with sprained thumbs and Ted with missing earlobes…”
Being married to Ted Hughes may not have been the best thing for Sylvia’s mental health. He left her for another woman – Assia Gutmann Wevill who, incidentally, also committed suicide (as did Sylvia…they both gassed themselves) but did one better than Plath by also killing their daughter} was slovenly (he rarely bathed), had a penchant for nosepicking in public, and was notoriously moody. Their tumultuous relationship can best be exemplified by their very first meeting at a student party (Newnham College, 1956); Hughes kissed her hard on the mouth and Sylvia bit him even harder on the cheek, drawing blood. According to Plath, they had fights “in which I come out with sprained thumbs and Ted with missing earlobes…”
Many people have accused Hughes of Sylvia’s ultimate downfall. Poet Robin Morgan pulled no punches in her 1972 poem entitled The Arraignment in which she laid the blame squarely at Hughes’ feet: “I accuse/Ted Hughes,” she wrote. Others would yell “killer” whenever Hughes read his poetry following Plath’s death. Someone chipped off Hughes’ name from her gravestone.
There is evidence too that following her son Nicholas’ birth in 1962, Sylvia became distressed because Hughes seemed disappointed that the baby was a boy. As time went on, he became increasingly standoffish to the child.
Interestingly, Hughes seems to admit having a hand in Sylvia’s demise. He would say that “people who live with me contract the gloom from me, but they don’t have the supports that I have to defend themselves from it.”
Despite Hughes, no one would deny that Sylvia had a propensity toward depression and that these behaviours manifested themselves prior to them meeting. Her diaries reveal a strong hatred of her mother and when her father died when Sylvia was 8, she pronounced that she would never speak to God again. Conflicting emotions of love, hate, anger and grief at the loss of her father would haunt Sylvia for the rest of her life. She felt that he had effectively committed suicide because he could have prevented his death (her father, Otto, refused to seek medical attention when ill; he had convinced himself that he had lung cancer when in fact he had diabetes. By the time he did seek help, he had developed gangrene in his leg and following amputation, spent the rest of his days in hospital in a slow decline).
While in college, Sylvia worked on the editorial board for the magazine Mademoiselle and suffered a mental breakdown which led to a suicide attempt. She chronicled this episode of her life in The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963. Here’s an excerpt:
“I hadn’t washed my hair for three weeks…
I hadn’t slept for seven nights.
My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semicircles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.
The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.”
There is evidence too that following her son Nicholas’ birth in 1962, Sylvia became distressed because Hughes seemed disappointed that the baby was a boy. As time went on, he became increasingly standoffish to the child.
Interestingly, Hughes seems to admit having a hand in Sylvia’s demise. He would say that “people who live with me contract the gloom from me, but they don’t have the supports that I have to defend themselves from it.”
Despite Hughes, no one would deny that Sylvia had a propensity toward depression and that these behaviours manifested themselves prior to them meeting. Her diaries reveal a strong hatred of her mother and when her father died when Sylvia was 8, she pronounced that she would never speak to God again. Conflicting emotions of love, hate, anger and grief at the loss of her father would haunt Sylvia for the rest of her life. She felt that he had effectively committed suicide because he could have prevented his death (her father, Otto, refused to seek medical attention when ill; he had convinced himself that he had lung cancer when in fact he had diabetes. By the time he did seek help, he had developed gangrene in his leg and following amputation, spent the rest of his days in hospital in a slow decline).
While in college, Sylvia worked on the editorial board for the magazine Mademoiselle and suffered a mental breakdown which led to a suicide attempt. She chronicled this episode of her life in The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963. Here’s an excerpt:
“I hadn’t washed my hair for three weeks…
I hadn’t slept for seven nights.
My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semicircles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.
The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.”
During that summer of 1953 in which she worked for Mademoiselle, Sylvia inadvertently missed out on an impromptu lunch date with Dylan Thomas that had been arranged by someone at the magazine. Distraught, she would spend days hanging out at his favourite N.Y. taverns or else in the lobby of his hotel, hoping to meet him some other way. One of her girlfriends on the editorial board of Mademoiselle said that Sylvia’s behaviour became increasingly odd, culminating an evening where the latter came into her room asking to borrow a dress because she had thrown all of hers off the roof.
With those episodes firmly entrenched and with her inability to get into a certain course at Harvard Summer School, Sylvia developed severe insomnia, not sleeping for days at a time. In addition, she could not write. One day her mother noticed healing scars on her legs and Sylvia admitted that she just “wanted to see if I had the guts”; she also confessed that she wanted to die. She was taken to see a psychiatrist and diagnosed with severe depression. She was given electroshock therapy and her insomnia worsened following these treatments to the point where she could not sleep for weeks on end.
With those episodes firmly entrenched and with her inability to get into a certain course at Harvard Summer School, Sylvia developed severe insomnia, not sleeping for days at a time. In addition, she could not write. One day her mother noticed healing scars on her legs and Sylvia admitted that she just “wanted to see if I had the guts”; she also confessed that she wanted to die. She was taken to see a psychiatrist and diagnosed with severe depression. She was given electroshock therapy and her insomnia worsened following these treatments to the point where she could not sleep for weeks on end.
On August 24, 1953, Sylvia broke into her family’s lockbox to steal sleeping pills.
She swallowed about 40 pills and hid in a crawl space under the porch. Her family
launched an intensive search for her when they discovered her missing. Her
disappearance quickly made the front pages of several major newspapers, including the information about the missing sleeping pills. Sylvia was finally discovered on August 26, after someone heard moaning. She was covered in her own vomit and
dazed and rushed to the hospital in a semi-comatose state.
Six months before her death at the age of 30, Sylvia wrote the following:
“ outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers’ beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.”
She swallowed about 40 pills and hid in a crawl space under the porch. Her family
launched an intensive search for her when they discovered her missing. Her
disappearance quickly made the front pages of several major newspapers, including the information about the missing sleeping pills. Sylvia was finally discovered on August 26, after someone heard moaning. She was covered in her own vomit and
dazed and rushed to the hospital in a semi-comatose state.
Six months before her death at the age of 30, Sylvia wrote the following:
“ outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers’ beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.”