Sylvia Plaths Mental Illness Revealed in her Poems - Assignment Example

A Critical Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s Mental Illness Revealed in her Poems A Critical Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s Mental Illness Revealed in her Poems The severity of misandry or ‘hatred for men’ in Sylvia Plath’s poems often allures her readers to go through the full-length of her biographies in search of any psychological traumas, wounds or complexities that might engender the furies of Plath’s narrators. A highly ambitious woman of gifted intellect, Plath was suffering from low-esteem and low self-confidence throughout her whole life. In a society that hardly pay its women the respect and attention usually given a child, Plath’s struggle to possess a free individual feminine self inevitably led to “her psychological problems and manic depressions” (Ling 2). The feminine self that Plath often explores in her poems is permeated with an autocratically free zeal which fiercely struggles for more breath under the choking grip of her male counterpart and ferociously victimizes her male foes. In an article “Mad Poets Society”, Alex Beam confirms that Plath began to develop schizophrenic syndromes and manic depression at the age of twenty. He says in this regard, “At the age of twenty, Plath experienced mild depressions while studying at Smith” (Beam 98). But a close psychoanalysis of the evidences in her poems as well as her life-events will necessarily reveal that her mental illness -schizophrenia and manic depression- can directly be connected to her experiences of her father Otto Plath and her husband Ted Hughes. In this paper I will explore the evidences of Plath’s real-life mental illness in Plath’s poems and stories. Also this paper will discuss whether Plath successfully uses her mental illness to her advantage, or whether she dissociates from it. When Plath was eight, Otto “developed gangrene in one foot after minor trauma and was found to have late stage untreated diabetes mellitus” (Cooper 4). On the course, “his leg was amputated but three weeks later” and unexpectedly, “while still in the hospital, he suffered a pulmonary embolism and died” (Cooper 4). Otto’s death affected young Plath visibly in two ways: first, her father’s meant the end of a male member’s love in her life. Secondly, it was the end of a male authority and restriction under which Plath’s young feminine had been panting. This “death at such a young age for Plath had some sort of a belated effect on her mental health” (Dyer 5). Referring to the complexity of Plath’s relationship with her father, Ling notes, “Plath herself faces a confusing relationship with her father, whom she lost to diabetes at quite an early age….Her need to please her father remains with her even to her death, as she was unable to exorcise the hold of this strange, authoritarian figure over her” (2). Later, this emotional complexity about her father further got aggravated by Ted Hughes’s extramarital affair as well as academic failure. Consequently, her literary works show an abundance of schizophrenic symptoms. Apart from Plath’s inability to think rationally, a good deal of her poems displays the paroxysmal and spastic emotions like burning anger, hatred and wrath against her father and her husband. ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Colossus’ ‘Full Fathom Five’, etc are some of these poems which displays her real-life schizophrenic symptoms. Indeed Schizophrenia is a “mental disorder that makes it hard for the patient to a. tell the difference between what is real and not real, b. think clearly, c. have normal emotional responses, and d. act normally in social situations” (Freudenreich 23). In ‘Daddy’, Plath’s hatred for her father obviously surpasses her rationality. She successfully portrays and then disparages a patriarchal ‘father-figure’ “in which [she] have lived like a foot / For thirty years, poor and white, / Barely daring to breathe or Achoo” (Plath, “Daddy”). It is quite normal for a feminist to take any patriarchal authority on the scaffold and kill it, as Plath herself does: “Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time” (Plath, “Daddy”). Indeed killing (figurative use for obliterating the memory) a father could have been too much poetic to wither the patriarchal hold on a woman’s life. But Plath’s readers become startled with the oncoming surge of anger in the later part of ‘Daddy’. Plath’s narrator cannot prove her to be the least rational feminist by having her control over her anger. She confesses that “At twenty [she] tried to die / And get back, back, back to [her father] / [she] thought even the bones would do” (Plath, “Daddy”). Such morbid fantasy of Plath could also have been too much poetic, but certainly at the risk of raising doubt about her own sanity. Even if the poem is taken apart from Plath’s real life and allowed to speak on its own, the narrator will immediately appear as the victim of severe manic depression and schizophrenia. Nonetheless the suicidal tendency mixed with her hatred appears to be the reflection of Plath’s own mental illness. In ‘Colossus’, Plath’s portrayal of her father is quite schizophrenic since it does not yield any clear hints whether she loves or hates him. She makes failed attempt to hear her dead father’s voice: “Thirty years now I have labored / To dredge the silt from your throat. / I am none the wiser” (Plath, “Colossus”). Along with the morbid imagination of her father’s “fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered / In their old anarchy to the horizon-line” (Plath, “Colossus”), the reference to the ‘Oresteia’ rather reveals Plath’s lifelong Electra complex. In ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ she seems to confess her Electra- Complex for her father. Plath’s self-acknowledged Electra-complex had been further aggravated by her schizophrenic depression at the age of twenty and later by the break-up with Ted Hughes. She continues to believe that she herself and to a great extent her mother had been responsible for the death of Otto Plath, as the narrator in ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ confessed: It was the gangrene ate you to the bone My mother said: you died like any man. How shall I age into that state of mind? I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting at my throat O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at Your gate, father - your hound-bitch, daughter, friend It was my love that did us both to death. (Plath, “Electra on Azalea Path”) Plath’s narrators’ common antagonism against men as a community of oppressors compels a reader, though misguidedly, to think of the peculiarity of their behavior and attitude toward men. Such frenzied peculiar violence of one of Plath’s narrator is evident in the following lines from the poem, “Lady Lazarus”: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air” (Plath, “Lady Lazarus”). Margaret Dickie comments on this peculiarity in the following lines: “Plath’s late poems are full of speakers whose rigid identities and violent methods not only parody their torment but also permit them to control it. The peculiar nature of the speaker in "Lady Lazarus" defies ordinary notions of the suicide.” (324) Indeed it is as peculiar as that of frenzied women who have been deprived of thinking rationally of men, and essentially she tends to be characterized as an antagonist against men, not against patriarchy. In this regard as Christina Britzolakis says, “Although Plaths confessional tropes are often seen in terms of a Romantic parable of victimization, whether of the sensitive poetic individual crushed by a brutally rationalized society, or of feminist protest against a monolithic patriarchal oppressor…” (37). When Plath uses schizophrenic hallucination to make Lady Lazarus dreading and terrifying using morbid imageries such as “walking miracle”, “skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade”, etc in a morbid atmosphere, she successfully conjures up a mighty feminine self. Indeed Plath’s unrealistic and villainous portrayal of men are best evident in the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”, as Eillen M. Aird says, “A companion piece to Daddy, in which the poet again fuses the worlds of personal pain and corporate suffering, is ‘Lady Lazarus. In this poem a disturbing tension is established between the seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly light form of the poem.” (12) Yet the male antagonists in Plath’s poetry deserve a particular share of her criticism, since the particular contexts of male suppression that Plath deals with depict the nature of patriarchy to a certain extent. When the narrator in ‘Daddy’ says, “Daddy, I have had to kill you”, her words is to be taken both literally and figuratively. It is literally because she believed she killed his father. Without being ashamed, Plath uses such schizophrenic confusion between reality and imagination and between love and hatred in a number of her poems. But Plath’s reader may ask: what advantages do these raw portrayals of schizophrenia bring for her as a poet? Indeed infusion of Plath’s own schizophrenia into her poems makes them more readable as a freedom loving woman’s raw perception of a loving father as the representative of the patriarchal authority. It is true that Plath’s schizophrenia helps her to make her poems more palatable with the rich primordial and historical imageries. But her schizophrenic confusion about her love and hatred for her father establishes her as a feminist who is aware of the necessity of a fatherly figure while discarding the patriarchal essence from it. Meanwhile, such schizophrenic confusion also may provoke her readers to comment that Plath has failed to pursue the dichotomy between a father and the patriarchal authority. Traditional feminist discourses very often associate patriarchy with women’s inferiority, suppressed voice and lack of identity in the society. In most cases in these discourses, the male counterparts as the representatives of patriarchy undergo severe criticisms, even though these male characters individually may be less culpable. Plath’s poems are almost autobiographical and two of Plath’s common victims are her father and her husband. In her poems she fails to perceive the dichotomy between a male character and a male society. Oft-repeatedly she confuses between the individual male characters and the overall patriarchy. A ‘father’ or a ‘husband’ can effectively represent so-called patriarchy and, therefore, can be admonished. But if the ‘father’ or ‘husband’ as a person apart from the collective entity ‘patriarchy’ cannot be discarded ruthlessly as narrators in Plath’s poems do. This failure to pursue the dichotomy between a male in a particular context and patriarchy as a much wider topic tend to misguide them to offload their wrath on their male counterparts slaying them with merciless triumph. Works Cited Aird, Eillen M. Sylvia Plat: Her Life and Work. New York: Eileen M. Aird, 1973 Beam, Alex. “The Mad Poets Society.” Atlantic Monthly (10727825) 288.1 (2001): 96-103. Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999 Cooper, Brian. “Sylvia Plath and the depression continuum.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 96(6) (2003): 296-301. Dickie, Margaret. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Illinois: University of Illinois, 1979 Dyer, Derby. Mental Illness in Literature: Case Studies of Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Perkins Gillman. Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences; Honors College, 2010 Freudenreich O, Weiss AP, Goff DC. “Psychosis and schizophrenia”, In: Stern TA, Rosenbaum JF, Fava M, Biederman J, Rauch SL, eds. Massachusetts General Hospital Comprehensive Clinical Psychiatry. 1st ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Mosby Elsevier;2008: chap 28. Ling, Clarissa LEE. “Voices of Feminism and Schizophrenia in Plaths Poetry”, 12 November, 2012. Available at Plaths, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus”, 02 December, 2010. available at Plaths, Sylvia. “Daddy”, 12 November, 2012. Available at Plaths, Sylvia. “Electra On Alzea Path”, 12 November, 2012. Available at Plaths, Sylvia. “Colossus”, 12 November, 2012. Available at Read More