Eddie declared her science requirement a “distortion and diversion” from her “real problems.” He did not assume that because she was a woman she was no good at science. He knew Plath better than that. “It would be difficult to convince me at this stage of the game, that you don’t have the mental equipment to meet this subject…I can only conclude that you have made this course a scapegoat.” He ended with a declaration of love and tried to extract a promise that she would seek psychiatric help. “I only hope that this once you will heed me before events prove me correct.”48
Eddie was right: depression was the devouring monster, not Sylvia’s science course. But she may not have understood the distinction. Sylvia wanted to see a psychiatrist so that she could get out of taking the course, not to seek treatment for depression. She felt that if she were released from science, she would regain her mental equilibrium. On the back of an envelope that fall she wrote, “Escape: Mary? Science? Job? Girls in House? Patch? Responsibility?” Her series of question marks underscores her confusion as to the source of her misery. Next to this list, she wrote, “Wisdom: more time, more rest, less physical danger”—as if less classwork and fewer sinus infections could cure her mental maladies.49
Alison Prentice Smith, from the class of ’55, recalled hearing, in the fall of 1952, that Sylvia locked herself in a dormitory kitchenette and turned on the gas oven. “The college authorities were horrified,” Alison said, and sent maintenance crews out to all the dormitories to remove the transoms over the kitchenette doors. Though the story was likely just a rumor, Sylvia’s alleged suicide attempt became a source of dark humor among Alison and her friends: “Whenever any one of us was depressed, she would cry out, ‘Ma, send me a transom!’ We certainly didn’t feel any sense of tragedy, just awe. Clearly there was someone next door who was even more alienated than we were, and certainly more desperate.”50
Plath’s letters and journal entries from that November show she was indeed contemplating suicide. Aurelia later alluded to this dark period to Dr. Beuscher, saying Sylvia had told her “she hadn’t been able to sleep for a month and was thinking of suicide.” Aurelia called Sylvia right away, extremely alarmed. Sylvia seemed calmer after they spoke, and much better when she returned home for Thanksgiving.51 In her journal, Sylvia compared her “resurrection” to that of Lazarus, already laying the foundation for her poem “Lady Lazarus” a decade later.52
Plath wrote two stories around this time about her depression. “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,” which she dated December 12 and submitted to Robert Gorham Davis’s Style and Form class, is a surreal allegory that gives a vivid sense of her inner turmoil that fall. Mary Ventura, a young woman, reluctantly says goodbye to her parents and boards a train heading for “the north country.” On the platform newsboys yell ominous headlines about ten thousand citizens being “sentenced” for unknown crimes—possibly an allusion to McCarthy’s witch hunts. A grandmotherly woman familiar with the route sits next to Mary, and makes small talk as they pass through “barren” apocalyptic landscapes of burning hills and deserted stations. Mary becomes increasingly nervous as the sun sets and her companion warns her they will soon enter the “long tunnel.” When the train stops at the sixth station, a terrified lady in a fur coat begs to stay on longer. She hides her ticket, but two guards on the platform take her away. Mary watches, filled suddenly with apprehension about her destination: the ninth kingdom. “But what is the ninth kingdom?” Mary asks her companion. “ ‘You will be happier if you do not know,’ the woman said gently. ‘It is really not too bad, once you get there. The trip is long down the tunnel, and the climate changes gradually. The hurt is not intense when one is hardened to the cold.’ ” Mary realizes that the passengers have all chosen to die. The train is suicide.
“I won’t stay. I won’t,” she cries. “I will get the next train back home.” But that, her companion tells her, is impossible. “Once you get to the ninth kingdom, there is no going back. It is the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will.” Mary decides she will pull the emergency cord, to her companion’s delight. “That is the one trick left,” she tells her young charge. “The one assertion of the will remaining. I thought that, too, was frozen.” Mary stops the train and jumps off at the seventh kingdom, where she emerges into a sunny park full of children. There, a woman resembling her companion is selling “white roses and daffodils” in the “spring of the year.” “I have been waiting for you, dear,” the woman says.53 Mary has outrun her own suicide.54
Plath’s structure is Dantean—she had been reading Dante that November—but the story’s real subjects are depression, suicide, and rebirth. This was the first time Plath had faced, albeit obliquely, her mental “difficulties” in fiction. Mademoiselle rejected “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” in March 1953, but it laid the foundation for 1955’s “Tongues of Stone,” about her stay in McLean, and, eventually, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” and The Bell Jar. It shows Plath already grafting an allegorical trajectory onto her psychological struggles—mining them, even in the depth of her depression, for creative potential.
January 1953’s “Dialogue,” which Plath also submitted to Davis’s writing class, explored similar themes. The piece, written as a script, was likely based on the real conversation Sylvia had with Marcia in November. “Alison” and “Marcia” sit in their dorm room on a Saturday night discussing Alison’s troubles:
A: I’m sick of the damn desiccated ritual: “Hello. How are you? How is he? Oh no. Oh really. Oh divine.” I’m sick to death of it.
M: So what are you going to do? Invent a new language? You’re going to burn yourself out if you keep it up this way. Relax for a change. Get philosophical.
Marcia tells Alison that polite language “is all part of the machinery that makes life easy…The automatic handshake, the tilt of the hat, the dry kiss on the cheek of the maiden aunt.” But Alison protests that silence would be better. “At the table sometimes, at dinner, I could go quite mad listening to the voices. Did you ever let your ears blur the sound of voices, the way your eyes, forgetful, can blur the print on a page? The voices fall apart, senseless, like the inane clucking of birds. Saying nothing in another language.” Marcia presses: “You’ve got to have some insulation from the black vacuum, don’t you?” But Alison scorns the “distractions” that people use to numb themselves from the “agony of free will”—religion, movies, television, dreams. She refuses to “numb” her pain or use “euphemisms.” “Why not use the good vile words. Damn. Dung. Hell. God, they sound great. Scrawl them on the sidewalks and fences and shock the ladies and the gentlemen.”55 This is exactly what Plath would do in her Ariel poems, where her language becomes short and curt, as in “Lady Lazarus”: “I do it so it feels like hell.” In her notes from her freshman-year art class with Mr. Manzi, Plath wrote, “To hell with description—to hell with long adjectival phrases, elaborate metaphors and ornate similes—life, dirt, grime, love, sun, mud, leaves, rain—get them brightly, sharply, in short dynamic phrases.”56 In her later poems, she would invent a new language for female anger.
Alison believes in nothing but “physical deterioration” after death: “the stopping of the blood, the freezing of the mind, and all the rolls of picture film inside it.” There is some relief, she feels, in “losing the identity, the ego,” but nothing more. For her, heaven and hell exist only on earth, in the mind. When Marcia asks her why she thinks life is worth living, Alison replies that she is not at all sure that it is, but that she wants to “affirm life” nevertheless. How? asks Marcia. “Trying to figure the most creative way I can spend those thirty million minutes, that’s all. No opium, even if the hurt is bad.”
At the dialogue’s end, Alison describes her depression to Marcia in a passage lifted straight out of Plath’s own journal, quoted above. “God, and you didn’t tell anyone. Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Marcia asks. “I didn’t think I could,” Alison answers. �
�I was afraid. I was afraid that maybe they would look at me, into my eyes, and say: ‘Why, I do believe you are right. There is nothing there. Nothing there at all.’ ” Alison finally tells Marcia she now feels “much better”—mainly because she has been able to speak honestly with a sympathetic listener. Plath’s title suggests that dialogue, communication, and friendship are pathways to recovery. Sylvia was a prideful woman, and her depression embarrassed her. She did not want to burden others with her troubles. To heal, she needed friends like Marcia who would let her be “unproud.” And she needed to write—to affirm her “thirty million minutes” of life through creativity.
* * *
TED HUGHES’S FRIEND Luke Myers later claimed that Plath’s English education at Smith had been far inferior to that of a Cambridge undergraduate. Plath’s English syllabi belie this assertion; honors English required intensive courses in the medieval period to the twentieth century.57 (In her 1953 spring semester, she took only English classes: Technical Fiction and Criticism, Milton, and Modern Poetry.) Sylvia was also reading sophisticated critics, pondering the relationship between sound, rhythm, rhyme, metaphor, and image in the work of Randall Jarrell, David Daiches, Stephen Spender, Edmund Wilson, F. O. Matthiessen, Helen Gardner, and I. A. Richards, as well as the classic New Critical bibles, F. R. Leavis’s New Bearings in Modern Poetry and Cleanth Brooks’s Modern Poetry and the Tradition. These books prepared her for Cambridge, where Leavis taught and which was then the epicenter of New Criticism. In one English notebook from her sophomore year, she discussed the “ ‘New’ Criticism” at length, citing the approach’s famous dictum, “A poem should not mean, but be.” “Word=symbol valuable for itself as well as capacity of representation. Work of art=object of knowledge valuable in and for itself—Actual words are tremendously important. Great emphasis of naked poem—can’t even be paraphrased because of uniqueness,” she wrote, summing up the major ideas behind the critical movement.58 Professors such as Robert Gorham Davis, Mary Ellen Chase, Alfred Kazin, and Elizabeth Drew would ensure that Sylvia was well prepared to argue the intricacies of modernist poetry with the most brilliant minds at Cambridge. (Davis told Plath’s thesis advisor, George Gibian, that “he had never had a talented writer in his creative writing class who was not a little neurotic…except Sylvia.”)59
In her Smith English papers, Plath circled back to a core set of intellectual themes and dilemmas that interested her personally: escapism versus “the agony of will” in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men; character versus fate in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge; rebirth through suffering in Synge’s Riders to the Sea; Romanticism and modernity in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard; chiaroscuro in Milton; sound textures and poetic technique in Edith Sitwell; the struggle for autonomy in Nietzsche. Nearly all of these themes would resurface in Plath’s poetry and fiction.
Plath wrote her senior thesis on the double in Dostoevsky. But her interest in the subject predated her thesis. A January 1951 paper, “The Dualism of Thomas Mann,” was her first academic exploration of doubleness. She began with a critic’s quote that could well apply to her own burgeoning sense of “dualism”:
Thomas Mann views reality as dualistic and antithetic; there is a conflict of opposites in everything. Every phenomenon has two facets. Disease looked at in one way is degrading and renders the sufferer doubly physical. In another aspect it is ennobling and heightens man’s humanity. The finished product of art may be chaste and beautiful; yet how often does it have its origin in darkness and the forbidden.60
Plath had pondered many of these issues in her journal, particularly the “ruinous antithesis,” as she quoted in her Mann paper, “between burgher and artist.” All her life she tried to reconcile the subversive artist with the respectable, bourgeois intellectual. Plath noted that though Mann showed a “bourgeois desire for order…the artist in him realizes that when the currents cross in man there is inner turmoil and often a seething unbalance.” Surely she saw the same forces working at cross-currents within herself. She was effectively trying to diagnose what she still hoped was a philosophical, rather than psychological, problem. Hers was, she thought, simply a spirit at war with itself, in need of reconciliation.
In a March 1951 paper titled “Modern Tragedy in the Classic Tradition,” Plath again pondered suffering philosophically. She looked to Aristotle, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche for a unifying definition of tragedy, concluding that it was where “pain and exaltation become one.” She was slowly discovering the themes and symbols that would flow through her best poetry: “the bleak, keen exaltation that comes from a journey through the realms of suffering toward heightened feeling; it is exaltation that may be likened to the blue steel edge of a freshly whetted knife.” Tragedy was “serene agony, almost mute in its grandeur”—words that summon the dead, statuesque Greek heroine of her late poem “Edge.” She considered that in Greek tragedy, like Oedipus Rex, the “fatal adversary is himself.”61 This was powerful, brilliant analysis from an undergraduate.
The following month, in April 1951, Plath continued along the same vein in a paper on Amy Lowell’s poem “Patterns,” which was one of her “personal favorites.” In “Patterns,” the young female speaker ponders her soldier-lover’s death as she walks alone in a garden. Plath noted that at first the poem’s “patterns”—the ornate garden with its precise paths, the young woman in her “stiff, brocaded gown”—seem innocuous.
But as the poem progresses, one senses the growing rebellion which this woman feels against patterns and one realizes that it is really the stiffness of convention which is symbolized throughout the poem by the stiff, correct brocade, the bones and stays, and each button, hook, and lace. Here is a woman who was about to “break the pattern” for her lover, and he is killed in a “pattern called war.”
There is bitter irony in her last cry from the heart, “Christ! What are patterns for?”62
Plath’s critical commentary on a female poet’s protest against conformity and convention brings to mind the insidious ways in which the “patterns” of fashion and war would later merge in The Bell Jar. In Lowell’s poem, the speaker longs to shed her metaphorical corset and wander naked: “What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown! / I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground. / All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.” In Plath’s novel, we see what Plath may have borrowed from Lowell when Esther Greenwood sheds her “corseted” identity: she stands on the roof of the Amazon Hotel and throws her slips into the “dark heart of New York.”63
By her junior year, Sylvia had become adept at taking poems apart and putting them back together again—explaining, stanza by stanza, how the chosen form of rhymes, half rhymes, assonance, and dissonance worked in tandem with the content. She was best at recognizing the importance of sound patterns. Her papers on Yeats and Dylan Thomas bear the mark of thorough, if plodding, close reading in the New Critical tradition. In an analysis of Auden’s “Fish in the Unruffled Lakes,” for example, she took great pleasure in explicating Auden’s rhymes: “the varied vowel sounds produce a textural pattern of bell-like cadences, now clear, now muted. The vowel level of ‘gone’ sinks to the duller sound of ‘done,’ which lengthens into the hollow clang of ‘wrong.’ ”64 And so on. She especially appreciated the power of poetic form to imply one meaning while carefully concealing another, as in Yeats’s great elegy “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.”65
Plath’s thirty-page paper on Edith Sitwell, which she wrote for Elizabeth Drew’s Modern Poetry unit in March 1953, repeatedly returned to Sitwell’s experiments with sound and form, as well as her thematic trajectory from winter to spring. Though the male modernists, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, and Dylan Thomas, formed the bedrock of Plath’s English education, she loved Sitwell’s “bucolic eden, her rocketing jazz fantasies, her nightmare cannibal land, her wartorn hell of the cold, and her metaphysical sun-permeated universe.”66 Sitwell would bec
ome an important poetic influence on Plath’s work.67
Although Plath wrote mostly about literature during her Smith years, she explored the philosophy of Nietzsche in several papers. Her 1954 paper “The Age of Anxiety and the Escape from Freedom,” which she wrote for Mrs. Koffka’s European history class, was ostensibly about Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. But Plath continually brought her argument back to Nietzsche and her desire “to climb still higher, out of the womblike security of complacent collective values into the realm of the strong, individualistic winds: ‘for rather will I have noise and thunders and tempest blasts, than this discreet, doubting cat-repose.’ (Zarathustra, 182).” Speaking of Auden’s poem “September 1939” in the same paper, she wrote, “This verse, I think, contains the kernel of our modern problem. The insecure individual ‘clings to the average.’ How Nietzsche scorned and shouted against this: ‘That…is mediocrity, though it be called moderation….Ye ever become smaller, ye small people! Ye crumble away, ye comfortable ones!’ (Zarathustra, 188–89).”68 Plath called Auden’s drinkers in the bar “pathetic weaklings” and ended her paper by again invoking Nietzsche:
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