Society Vs the Muse
Sylvia Plath's struggle to balance life and writing.
? The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.?
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude.
Sylvia Plath, one of America?s greatest female poets, was born October 27, 1932. She took her life on February 11, 1963. In the brief thirty years of her life, she struggled to understand the place of women writers in what was then a profession dominated by men. Before unrelenting depression drove her to suicide, she wrote ground-breaking poems and an autobiographical novel that forever enshrined the inner and outer lives of women as legitimate topics of literature.
Like most creative people, Plath?s life was a constant battle between the demands of society and the call of her Muse. Writing was an essential part of her life. She described it in her journal as ?a religious act ?which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes on its own in the world.?
Plath came of age in the America of the 1950s, in a society that did not offer either encouragement or role models for women who wanted to devote themselves to a career or who wanted to venture down the road less traveled. While women were increasingly going to college, it was still assumed that they would marry and devote themselves to their husband and children. Plath struggled with this rigid definition of a woman?s role. In her novel ?The Bell Jar,? her heroine Esther complains that ? My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men?.I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.?
Plath spent the majority of her life trying to balance her conflicting desires to be the ?perfect woman? and to be respected in the literary world. Her writing reflects her struggle and foreshadows the feminist debates that were to begin shortly after her death. In ?The Bell Jar? she examines the overwhelming desire to ?have it all,? using an image that is equally relevant to women today. Esther Greenwood, her fictional alter-ego, sees her future as a branching fig tree, with each fig offering an opportunity: family, writing, career, traveling etc. Unable to choose the proper fig, Esther loses all her choices as the figs rot before her.
In her journal Plath wrote: ? I want to write stories and poems and a novel and be Ted?s wife and a mother to our babies?. But in ?The Bell Jar,? Esther proclaims: ? I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.? This conflict between the world of men and Plath?s dreams was the mainstay of her prose and poetry.
Trying to walk the accepted path, Plath took a position as an English teacher at Smith college while Ted Hughes, her poet husband, found a position at the University of Massachusetts. It was only a matter of months before she decided that ? it?s exciting and rewarding to introduce students to writers one particularly enjoys, to stimulate discussions and to watch students develop, but it takes time and energy. Too much, we found, to be able to work at any length on any writing of our own. My ideal of being a good teacher, writing a book on the side, and being an entertaining homemaker, cook and wife is rapidly evaporating. I want to write first, and being kept apart from writing, from giving myself a chance to really devote myself to developing this spectacular promise that the literary editors write me about when they reject my stories, is really very hard. I see too well the security and prestige of academic life, but it is Death to writing.?
Plath and Hughes finished the school year, then decided to risk living as freelance writers. Plath was aware of the chance she was taking, noting in a letter to her brother that ? every time you make a choice you have to sacrifice something. We can?t now and maybe never will earn a living by our writing, which is the one profession we want. What will we do for money without sacrificing our energy and time to it and hurting our work??
Plath was subject to emotional mood swings and seemed caught between cycles of mania and depression. When she was able to write, all was well with her world. Elated when her first poem was accepted by the New Yorker, she wrote to her mother: ?You see what happens the minute one worships one?s own god of vocation and doesn?t slight it for grubbing under the illusion of duty to Everybody?s-Way-Of-Life.? But rejections and interruptions to her writing routine could plunge her into a deep depression. Faced with these obstacles, others might have abandoned the unsure path of the writer for the more certain roles of housewife or teacher, but Plath managed to remain faithful to her vision and to her Muse. She constantly resubmitted her rejected works and forced herself to tackle new projects, even when she had little faith in her ability. Her first book of poems, ?Colossus,? was rejected numerous times before it was finally published with lukewarm reviews. She bitterly dismissed it as a ?good gift book? and continued to develop her poetic voice.
To create, one must be alone and set aside uninterrupted time to spend with the Muse. Plath and Hughes were both committed to the writing life and encouraged each other. But with the arrival of their two children, Plath found her writing schedule intruded upon by the needs of her babies. Hughes initially helped with childcare so she could write, but when their marriage dissolved the full responsibility for the children fell to her. Her time alone now consisted of early morning writing sessions before the children woke and unpredictable periods when she could arrange for childcare.
From the ruins of her perfect life Plath discovered the raw material for the ?Ariel? poems ---the best of her life. The ground-breaking type of creativity that she tapped into in her final months required her descent into the chaos of the unconscious to encounter the pain and suffering that resided within. She experienced the Dark Night of the Soul that can lead to a rebirth, but was too depressed to escape from that abyss. Ultimately she lost her battle with society?s unyielding norms, but before she took her life she created a legacy of poetry and prose that can be shared by all women haunted by the same conflicting desires that destroyed her.
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