Sylvia's perseverance to her craft, the constant submissions going out by post, despite illness, babies to feed, clean, and clothe, and the terrifying passion in her voice, kept me going at a time when I felt a similar kind of creative urgency and struggle to find a way to write. And yet, in the end she tucked a towel beneath her children's bedroom door and let the stove run unlit until she died. For me the nagging question, the other reason I read and reread her poems, is. . .Why? Why was death the preferred choice for her? How could a mother do such a horrific thing?
I would have rather read her work without the knowledge of her suicide, because it forever warps the experience of the reading. It makes me feel like a gawker at a pile up on the freeway, succumbing to that morbid human urge to study tragedy. Perhaps it serves some instinctual Darwinian Survival of the Fittest purpose. Study the tragic lest it happen to me kind of thing. I'm one of those people who as a child was called sensitive, so I have always tended to sympathize, empathsize, any-kind-of-thize with other people's feelings. And my thought processes go like this: if Sylvia was driven to suicide, won't I be also? Years of training to let reason, and keen observation of people I believe are less sensitive than me, rein in my over-active (though endlessly useful and entertaining) thizing mind has helped me respond to these kinds of questions with: no, no I will not.
The truth is not all creative busy moms (single or otherwise) commit suicide. In fact very few do. And when we read their poetry or novels, admire their photos, sculptures, paintings, films we don't experience it through a veil of suicide. Sylvia took her own life and forever changed how her art would be perceived. Maybe that was why she did it, but I don't think so. For what it's worth, which is not much to the loved ones she left behind, I think she suffered from a form of mental illness that made suicide a constant and viable option for her. As if her mind just kept suggesting it and eventually she saw some twisted logic in it and killed herself. Clearly from her earlier attempts this choice had been hers for the taking for decades. That's a long time to listen to bad advice, even your own. It must have been exhausting.
Despite this sad veil, her work moved me and revealed a way to make beautiful the expression of anger, which a few years back was essential for my own work. Again I feel the guilt of a stranger at a crash site. Did I really have any business benefiting from Plath's work, considering the struggles she went through to achieve it? I can assuage the guilt a little with the reminder that Plath was desperate to be heard, so listening is not a crime. But I've always had a ready supply of Catholic guilt on hand, even before becoming Catholic, so I still feel bad when I draw inspiration from her. But then writers, and poets in particular, need to write from a position of discomfort, so maybe feeling bad is good? (welcome to the inside of my brain)
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