Another, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz by Gail Crowther, published in April, is a dual biography of Plath and fellow Bostonian poet Anne Sexton, who met at a writers' seminar held by poet Robert Lowell in 1959. One of these books, The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson, published in March 2020, focuses solely on her suicide. A new biography claiming to shed more light on her life than before appears on bookshelves with increasing regularity, including three notable releases in the past 18 months alone. The desire to know Plath has nevertheless fuelled an industry. The problem we face with Plath is that the mythos of her life and death has made it difficult to disentangle her art from that – but also know who the "real" Sylvia Plath was, in any case. A similar prejudice has continued to affect creative women, whereby they are dismissed as using art as therapy. Biographies often cite Plath's works as evidence for real-life events, and, as is the case with Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, use them to claim Plath was always depressed Stevenson ends a chapter about her youth with the egregious statement: "The idea of suicide formed in her mind like the ultimate and irrevocable fig", referring to the famous metaphor from The Bell Jar where the heroine Esther Greenwood sees all her potential futures as figs on a fig tree. They are grounded in Plath's lived experience, as all literature must be, but they are not, of course, direct autobiography. Before feminism's second wave and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Plath wrote of her discontent with a woman's inferior place, her sexual urges, and how these pressures affected her mental health.Īt the same time, The Bell Jar and Plath's poetry are works of fiction. But the truth is that Plath was one of the first authors to tap into the raw reality of being a woman. This isn't the case for narratives of male comings-of-age, from the works of JD Salinger to David Foster Wallace. To read her coming-of-age novel The Bell Jar, for example, is seen by many as a girlish rite of passage towards more serious literature, a perception often reflected in the YA-style cover designs. The impact of this interpretation's proliferation is to devalue women's engagements with Plath. Plath has become a crude symbol of the girl outsider who rejects conventional standards of femininity to take her life, and death, into her own hands. Her works represent rebellious but depressed young women as evidenced by their appearance in pop-culture settings – Kat in the 1999 teen rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You clutches a copy of The Bell Jar, as does Maeve in recent Netflix series Sex Education. Since then, her name has become a by-word for female angst. Woolf's novels and Kane's plays are dubbed as being manifestations of mental illness, while Thomas's poetry is brilliant in spite of, rather than because of, his alcoholism and troubled life.Ĭhief among those female artists who have become defined by their suicide is the US poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, who died on 11 February 1963. When a male author dies prematurely, it is a tragic stopper in his creative output – we mourn the poetry Dylan Thomas never wrote after he died aged 39 in 1953, for example, distinct from his self-destructive lifestyle. From Virginia Woolf to Sarah Kane, everything she did, everything she created during her life becomes part of a death-drive narrative. When a female author dies by suicide, it defines her.
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