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A STRUGGLE FOR AN IDENTITY:
DOUBLENESS IN THE LIFE AND WORK OF
SYLVIA PLATH.

By

Ana Maria Martin Castillejos

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of American Studies

1 994

ABSTRACT

A STRUGGLE FOR AN IDENTITY:
DOUBLENESS IN THE LIFE AND WORK OF
SYLVIA PLATH.

By

Ana Maria Martin Castillejos

This thesis explores the internal and external factors that contributed to Sylvia
Plath's mental split. It also shows how her upbringing, education and marriage and the fact

of living in the 50's produced a life of turmoil that is reflected in her writings.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I particularly thank my adviser, professor Leonora Smith, for her help and
continuous encouragement. As a foreign student in Michigan State University, I have
found it particularly difficult to write this thesis as it is much longer than the papers I had
written so far during my graduate study in the United States. Besides, to write in a
language that is not your native one is always a challenge and one always wonders if the
readers can understand what you are trying to explain.

I would also like to express my gratitude to some of my friends who patiently
read the manuscript and gave me interesting insights that I generally included in my thesis.
These generous readers are the following: Shashi Pathak, Monika Fleischmann, Paul
Conway, Cathy Swender and Divya Alok Sundararn. I also thank Adrian Gaskins for his
emotional support and sincere friendship; as my best American friend he helped me very
much to know his country.

Finally, I am very grateful as well to my friend Frank Bramkamp whose help was
indispensable in making this thesis a reality.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

- INTRODUCTION

- FAMILY BACKGROUND

- ACADEMIC LIFE AT SMITH COLLEGE

- ANOTHER COUNTRY

- TED HUGHES: GOD AND MUSE

- A WOMAN IN THE FIFI'IES

- PLATH'S INFLUENTIAL READINGS ABOUT DOUBLENESS

iv

14
18
22
27

INTRODUCTION

[Summer 1953] Letter to an Over-grown, Over-protected, Scared, Spoiled
Baby:

This is the immediate time for a decision: whether or not to go to Harvard
Summer School. . .

I AM NOT GOING TO HARVARD SUMMER SCHOOL.

I will learn shorthand, typing, and write and read and write and read, and
talk to myself about attitudes, see the Aldriches and neighbors, and be nice
and friendly and outgoing, and forget my damn ego-centered self in trying
to learn and understand about what makes life rich and what is most
important.

You are an inconsistent and very frightened hypocrite: you wanted time to
think, to find out about yourself, your ability to write, and now that you
have it: practically 3 months of godan time, you are paralyzed,
shocked, thrown into a nausea, a stasis. You are plunged so deep in your
own very little whirlpool of negativism . . . Your mind is incapable of
thinking. . . . THINK CONSTRUCTIVELY. . . You are frozen mentally-
scared to get going, eager to crawl back to the womb. . . W
82-86)

Friday, June 20. [1958] . . . I go suspended in the void, the vacuum, the
exhaust of the year's teaching machine, which speeds off clicking and
purring. I must, again for the first time. . . and for the longest time, tightly
and creatively structure my days -fill myself with reading and writing
projects- keep a clean and well-run house. . . W 241)

. . . I envision myself as writing in the morning and reading widely and
being a writing-wife. I am simply not a career woman, and the sacrifice of
energy and lifeblood I'm making for this job is all out of proportion to the
good I‘m doing in it. 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. mm 329) .

2

On'August 25, 1953 a student at Smith College in Boston, was found in the
/cellar of her house in semicomatose condition. She had taken forty sleeping pills. Driven
to McLean Hospital she underwent shock treatment which made her improve dramatically.
Years later and at her request, she held private sessions with her McLean psychiatrist "to
help alleviate some of her emotional pain", as Paul Alexander describes in his book, Rough
Magic (224). Nevertheless, the treatment did not help the patient to overcome completely
her characteristic bouts of depression. About ten years after her first suicide attempt, on
the morning of February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath was found dead with her head in the even
of her apartment in 23 Fitzroy Road, London.

Much criticism has been written about Sylvia Plath's complex personality.
Nevertheless, most critics usually focus on a few specific aspects to try to explain the
poet's mental split. In this paper I will try to bring together different ideas that I have
developed from my readings on the subject. I will also try to emphasize that Plath's
condition as a woman is crucial to understand her work as a writer: the problems she
faced in order to "st " some time to write, the way she projected in her writings the
disadvantages of being a woman in the 50's and the manner she expressed her complex
feelings towards men. All these factors are intricately linked to her identity as a woman.
The internal and external factors in the poet's life that will be discussed below are essential
for a thorough understanding of Plath's complex character and writings, her persistent
depression and her subsequent death. These are the following: her problematic family
background, her education at Smith College, a very traditional institution at the moment,
her academic experience at Cambridge and life in England, her marriage to the writer Ted
Hughes and her life in the 50's.

After presenting what are the most important circumstances that gradually
weakened the writer's ability to cope with her problems and life, I will explore how Plath‘s
schizophrenic tendencies are very much accentuated in her last book of poems, Ariel.

where Plath practically announces her ultimate death. In fact, the persistent presence of

3

certain elements (mirrors, shadows, reflections) in the poet's imagery, and her obsessive
desire to fuse with other selves outside her own (her husband, her children, her horse,
Ariel, etc.) reflect Plath's complex identity and show her desire to attain stability and gain
support from the outside world.

All these elements combined contributed to shape Plath's complex identity. We
will also see how the writer's efforts to built her own identity were not totally
unconscious. Her extensive readings on doubleness and her thesis on the "double" in
Dostoevsky early on in her academic life show her deep interest on the subject. As a
result, she was familiar with many writings on that topic and all these readings focused on
the unconscious had, without any doubt, a significant effect on the way the writer both

saw herself and expressed her thoughts.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Plath's parents, Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober first met at the Boston University
College of Practical Arts and Letters where Otto was teaching an advanced course in
German and Aurelia was his student-admirer. Otto had emigrated to the States at the age
of 16 from a Prussian town in the Polish Corridor. Admitted to Harvard, he earned a
doctorate in zoology and entomology. On the other hand, Aurelia was a second-
generation Austrian whose father had emigrated to the States from Vienna. Otto was 43
and Aurelia 22 when they got married on January 4, 1932.

Very soon and at her husband's request, Aurelia gave up teaching at Melrose
High School in Massachusetts to become a full-time housewife. Shortly afterwards she
also became a mother. In fact, Sylvia was born scarcely ten months after, on October 27,
1932, followed by Warren on April 27, 1935. The Plaths had only two children. For the

sake of peace in marriage, Aurelia was forced to accept a secondary, wifely role.

4

Therefore, she became his assistant, his secretary-typist, forgetting her own professional
aspirations. In fact, because Otto was not particularly good at writing, Aurelia did the job
and, once she had finished it, Otto checked the text for factual accuracy. For example,
when Otto Plath wrote his article "Insect Societies", Aurelia, even while having to take
care of Sylvia, took notes from the background material that her husband selected (about
seventy books), wrote a rough draft with them and after Otto wrote a second draft, she
edited and polished the manuscript. Despite Aurelia's exhausting job the honors for the
article were for her husband (Alexander 22). This makes us remember again Plath's lines
in "The Applicant": "A living doll, everywhere you look/ It can sew, it can cook,/ It can
talk, talk, talk.” It works, there is nothing wrong with it. " (33-36). Sylvia Plath expressed
her fear of repeating the role of female servant in W: "One
morning listening to Dodo Conway’s baby carriage would drive me crazy. And I made a
point of never living in the same house with my mother for more than a week." (11:13:11
1a.: 97).

To make things even more difficult for Aurelia, Otto Plath died of "diabetes
mellitus" on November 1940, only nine years after their marriage. Lack of money obliged
Aurelia to look for a job. She ended up teaching Medical Secretarial Procedures,
contributing, in that way, to increase the number of women who, like her, earned their
living by "serving men". Therefore, her role in the workplace replicated her work at
home.

By means of her alter ego from W, Esther Greenwood, Plath' phrases
her rebellion against her mother and also against society's traditional expectations towards
women. Esther/Sylvia says:\"The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.
I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters" (61). Evidently, Esther does not want to
serve men. She wants to be her own woman, but this idea makes her feel inadequate. She
is not comfortable with her own thoughts as she realizes that they are not conventional)

but, at the same time, she does not want to be like her mother or like her fiancee's mother:

5

educated women who dropped out of college to marry their professors, settle down in a
quiet town and take good care of their families. Here Plath expresses the impossibility of
picturing herself taking on a submissive and dependent role in life.

The same idea is illustrated in mm means of the character of Dodo
Conway, a Catholic who studied at Barnard and then married an architect. Dodo is
expecting her seventh child. Naturally, she has dropped any possible job just to take care
of her numerous offspring. Esther Greenwood/Sylvia Plath hates the idea of becoming
another Dodo.

Just as Aurelia's submission to her husband would be very influential for her
daughter, her parents' demands for perfection of their children would also prove significant
for the writer. As a young child, before her father's early death, Sylvia and her brother
Warren were encouraged by their mother "to perform" in front of their father, showing
him their progress in school and life. Probably, like most kids, they would anxiously
expect their father's final words of approval:

.after she and Otto had eaten their own, separate supper downstairs,
Aurelia_allgw_e_d Sylvia and Warren to come downstairs and spend thirty

minutes with their father. These occasions WWW

thatJhuntiLfamilussembled had a theatrical quality With Otto as
their audience, the children became performers.. W

emulated Wm“
Wuand Aurelia quickly put them to bed. (My
emphasis) (Alexander 28)

Thus, the children's s"progress" was affectionately rewarded by their otherwise
cold and distant father.

From a young age, Sylvia Plath needed to be different, to stand out and
improve herself. In fact, her great will to write would be fueled by her mother's ambition

and it would eventually lead Sylvia to move away from the conventional values of the

O

6

time, including Aurelia's. Plath wrote passionately: "I want, I think, to be omniscient . . . I
think I would like to call myself 'The girl who wanted to be God.‘ " (qtd. in Stevenson
l6). Plath's need for perfection would eventually make her reject her (she thought)
"mediocre" identity. trying to imitate much more "brilliant" writers (Robert Lowell,
Theodore Roethke, Ted Hughes). Her inclination to lean excessively on the people she
loved or admired (almost all of them male), at whom she looked at herself like in a "magic
mirror". Therefore, when these loved people deserted her, as her father had, due to death,
unfaithfulness, etc., Plath's entire world became a crisis and with it, her whole conception

of her own identity.

Freudian theories are helpful to explain Plath's circumstances and life as Freud
emphasized the importance of the father figure during childhood in an individual's life. If
we try to analyze Plath's life in Freudian terms we see that the writer's childhood was
stolen very early by her father's death. As a result, Plath, hated her father because he died
and made the whole family unhappy; Linda Wagner-Martin tells us how the poet even
declared her rebellion against God for letting her father die. Plath also resented her father
because, after his death, Aurelia Plath had to work very hard and was unable to spend
much time with her children. After Otto Plath's death, the poet lacked a male role. Though
her mother took on the financial role of a male, and though she was ambitious for Sylvia's
future, she did not serve as the kind of model which would give Sylvia ways of dealing
effectively with the realities of her own life.

When her father passed away Sylvia, the eldest child in the family, seemed to
take on some of the attributes of the father figure in the family. This is one way of
thinking about her identity crisis: she looked at life from a woman's body but with a man's
mentality.

Plath also resented her mother because she never publicly grieved for her

husband and because she never allowed her children to see their father dead. This notion

7

of protecting children from unpleasantries was characteristic of 1950's' America and, as we
will later see, this discontinuity between the difficult and complex reality and the more
pleasant but fraudulent surface became a persistent theme in Plath's life and work. The
Plath children were not allowed to become fully conscious of the fact of their father's real
death and of the reality of being orphans. Plath writes in W:

My mother hadn't let us come to his funeral because we were only children
then, and he had died in the hospital, so the graveyard and even his death
had always seemed unreal to me. (135)

Also, while looking at her father's grave, she says:

A fine drizzle started drifting down from the grey sky, and I grew very
depressed.
I couldn't find my father anywhere. ( 136)

Esther Greenwood/Sylvia Plath speaks of her father as if he was not dead, as if
she had not given up the possibility of finding him alive.

At the same time, after her husband's death Aurelia was not able to spend much
time with her children because, unlike most other US. women in the 1950's, she needed to
hold a full time job. Her mother's lack of affection would make Plath try to please her
constantly to get the attention she needed.

Plath's ceaseless need to get her mother's attention and approval would probably
derive as well from the writer's excessive psychological fusion with her since childhood.
Therefore, Plath's necessary differentiation of self to get a state of increased individuality
and independence was especially difficult. She, therefore, was constantly struggling
between two opposite feelings: her extreme love for her mother and dependency on

Aurelia's approval, and her hatred towards her mother as she realized her own inability to

8

break off the umbilical cord between both. Plath wrote the following on the afternoon of
October 16th, 1962:

Dear Mother,
. . . I need help very much now. . . I am writing the best poems of my life;
they will make my name. . .

I 'm getting an unlisted phone put in as soon as possible so I can call

out; you shall have the number. We 468-9)

It is evident that Plath wanted to give her mother her phone number in order to
mantain the suffocating connection that had kept them fused throughout their lives.
Nevertheless, on the morning of the same day, she had just written her famous poem
"Medusa":

My mind winds to you

Old bamacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair

In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of the line. . . . (13-17)

Here Plath seems to resent the excessive involvement of her mother in her own
life, her constant and asphyxiating presence.

Emotionally distanced from her father and mother as a child, Plath would have
feelings of hatred toward both of them. At the same time, not being able to express her
real feelings, she would internalize her guilt. This would cause her depression which
manifested itself at the end of her adolescence, as the writer tried to rebuilt her own
identity.

Plath was only able to express her profound hatred towards her parents at the

very end of her life, in poems like "Daddy" and "Medusa":

9
There's a stake in your fat black heart

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I‘m through. (76, 80)

Off, off, eely tentacle!

There is nothing between us. (40—41)

ACADEMIC LIFE AT SMITH COLLEGE

Sylvia Plath studied at Smith College, an institution "dedicated to fulfilling a
moral but unrevolutionary social obligation to American womanhood" (Stevenson 24).
The college was a prime example of an upper-class cultural institution. Though it took the
education of women very seriously, it-as it reflected the culture of the times-prepared
women to take their roles as wives of well-to-do men. It was conceived on liberal,
ladylike principles and women were not expected to take "unwomanly roles" in affairs of
government, business, art and sciences except as "volunteers" or hostesses, appendages to
their husbands. During Sylvia's undergraduate years, most of the faculty members at
Smith were men. Smith girls, educated for careers but prepared for marriage, were
unquestionably valuable on the nuptial market; they were, like Aurelia Schober herself,
trained to help their husbands with the kind of service that Plath's mother had provided
for her spouse. They were trained to be submissive and complacent helpers rather than
equal partners.

In the commencement address delivered by the Smith's Governor Adlai
Stevenson in May 1955, Stevenson stated that women's unanimous vocation was to be
wives and mothers who would eventually use their education to influence their husbands
and children in a positive way: "Men", he said, "are under tremendous pressure to adopt

the narrow view", therefore, women had to help them to resist it (qtd. in Stevenson 24).

10

This vision of a woman as part of a divided whole, as her husband's "better half,"
institutionalizes the desperate incompleteness which eventually left Plath bereft.

Five years later, when Plath was Dying to be a successful writer, the situation at
Smith had not changed: in an article of W published on January 3,
1960, its author, the President of Smith College at that time, complained: "there is a 60
per cent dropout of women students before graduation and most of this is due to their
early marriage and almost immediate proliferation of the species." (Janeway 506). In the
same article, a professor lamented the terrible waste represented by the education of
women when even the most intelligent left the classes to get married and have children.

Years later, Sylvia Plath complained in an essay that the American educational
system during the Fifties did a poor job and that there was no place in the American
culture for the artist (Wagner-Martin 83). Probably this clear conviction in Plath's mind
would contribute powerfully to her decision of leaving the United States looking for a
country where she had more opportunities as an artist.

On the other hand, the Smith years were also a time of enervating emotional
turbulence for the writer. She was trying to decide what kind of life she wanted. She
knew she wanted to be a great writer but she was conscious that she was not prepared for
that yet. She "needed experience" W 99). Plath explains by means of her
character, Esther Greenwood, that she could not be prepared to be a good writer
as she had not experienced basic and very important experiences in life such as.
having a love affair or a baby, or seeing somebody die (she had not even seen her own
father after he was dead). At the same time, she thought that, as a woman of the Fifties
she should marry and become a mother, but she had not yet found the right man, and
besides, she could not imagine herself living a life as limited and dependent as her

mother's.

ll

Plath's anxiety about her necessity to choose among different possible roles is
very well illustrated in W by the fig's tree metaphor that appears in the novel.

Esther/Sylvia explains her mental confusion in these terms:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future
beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and
children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a
brilliant professor, . . . , and Europe and Africa and South America, and
another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other
lovers with queer names . . .

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just
because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I
wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the
rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go
black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet (83).

Plath was torn between choices for the direction of her life. For example,
she did not know if she should give priority to her personal or to her professional life.
This indecision lead her to physical and mental paralysis: incapacity to move but also
inability to think and write. This tendency to creativity drought would torment her and
threatened her throughout all her professional career. For example, she complained in
her Journals of her inability to be original: "I am living between two unachieved
shapes: between the original teacher and the original writer: neither" (203). The same
problem appears mm when, after her stay in New York, Esther Greenwood
comes back home and is absolutely unable to write, to create, numbed by a physical and
mental paralysis (98-103).

During the fall of 1952, the symptoms of the writer's growing anxiety became
more and more evident. In the summer of 1953, after working for a month in New York
for the Mademoiselle College Board her depression grew worse and the writer finally tried

to commit suicide on August 24, 1953.

12

Thanks to the financial support of Olive Higgins Prouty, Sylvia Plath's benefactor
at Snrith, the writer was moved to McLean Hospital in Belmont, where she received
insulin therapy and clectroconvulsive shock treatment. The Bell 1a; describes all these
experiences with astonishing verisirnilitude. In fact, the experiences and characters
appeared illustrated with such verisirnilitude in the novel that Plath's mother never
wanted The Bell lg to be published in the United States. Mentally and emotionally
recovered, according to the doctors, Plath came back to Smith in the Spring semester of
1954. Her desire for perfectionism had led her to try to create an "ideal Sylvia" and her
unrealistic expectations had made her collapse. The writer's personal doctor at the
hospital, Beuscher, had tried to teach Sylvia to expect only reasonable successes but she
would keep on imposing excessively high expectations on herself.

On the verge of graduating from Smith, Plath was still insecure, still trapped in
the family value system that she had learned to question but could not reject entirely.
Therefore, when at nearly twenty-three, she received a fellowship to go to Cambridge
her goals were two: to get the best possible education there and to find a husband. On
February 25 she wrote in her journal:

My God, I'd love to cook and make a house, and surge force into a man's
dreams, and write, . . . I can't bear to think of this potential for loving
and giving going brown sere in me. Yet the choice is so important, it

fiightens me . . . a lot. (193m 109)

Just some hours after Plath wrote these desperate words she met her firture
husband, Ted Hughes, at the St. Botolph's celebratory party.

Later, in March 195 7, Sylvia came back in the United States and received ofi'rcial
confirmation of an instructorship at Smith. In September, she became a full-time teacher
at her old school. What was good news at the beginning ended up in a fierce internal

struggle due to her never-ending search for perfection:

I;

13

I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be
flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I‘m so good I must be perfect. Or
nothing. . . . The demon would humiliate me: throw me on my knees
before the college president, . . . ,everyone, crying: look at me, miserable,

I can't do it. (Journals 177)

Very soon, grading papers and attending the College's meetings were tasks too
absorbing for Sylvia Plath, who could not find the necessary time for writing, her real

vocation. She wrote to her brother, then in Austria:

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, . . . , is really very hard.
Wilma 329)

As we can see, Plath had to cope not only with the usual incompatibilities of
being a woman and trying to work at the same time, but with the added complication of
trying to earn a living by writing. In fact, Plath would eventually feel guilty for not taking
steady jobs, for refusing to teach and provide for a potential family. Therefore, she ended
up taking part-time jobs to help to support the family. This was the way a woman raised
in the Apollonian New England environment should behave, but Plath's commitment to the
Dionysian world was by then too strong to obey the old rules and conventions.

Apart from the social component there was a personal one: the dissatisfaction
she felt with herself for not working hard enough and the anger she felt towards her
mother, who had wanted her to be "what I have not felt like really being" (qtd. in
Stevenson 145), that was, a "success" on society's terms: a woman who tried to fulfill
her professional aspirations without forgetting her traditional role as a housewife and
mother. Sylvia's mother had struggled hard so that her daughter could have a better life,
but this, in turn, caused Plath to continually make the effort to meet her mother's never-
satisfied expectations: those ideals of self-denial, security and conventional domesticity
which were embedded in her culture and which she would clearly attack in Milan,

14

Sylvia Plath knew her own ambivalent feelings and rebelled against them and the
awareness of "hating" her mother. But her inability to live up to her own expectations

contributed to her first suicide attempt in 1953 and, later on, to her death in 1963.

ANOTHER COUNTRY

Sylvia Plath arrived at Cambridge in September 1955 after earning a Fulbright
Grant. She was twenty-three years old and expected to fulfill an academic goal as well
as a much more personal one: to get immersed in the sources of wisdom of the Old
Continent and find a husband.

In his book, W, Edward Butscher explains how
Plath spent the entire journey from the United States to England making love in her
cabin with different men (156-57). At a superficial level, this can be seen as the
expression of the writer's relief after leaving her original country behind and, with it,
all the values and taboo inherent to the Bostonian society in general and to her
conservative family in particular. Nevertheless, at a deeper level, Plath's incessant love-
making may be interpreted as the writer's urgent need to clarify and assert her own
sexual identity. This may be because, as a child, after her father's death she may have tried
to assume her father's male role. The early assumption of a male role would eventually
cause on her serious doubts in the development of her own sexuality, and trying to
clarify one's own sexual identity in a society and time where everything related to sex
was taboo was a difficult task. This Freudian interpretation of Plath's behavior which
emphasizes the importance of sex in the first stages of an individual's life, may be old-
fashioned, but Freudian theories are nevertheless interesting, being the root of most

modern theories about sexuality and a useful tool to interpret events.

15

It is difficult to determine how much Plath's decision to go and live in a
different country affected her life and writings. What seems clear is that she tried
to flee fi'om the rigid Bostonian world to a place where she could exercise her own
freedom and get rid of her family's puritanism. In fact, she was never able to leave
this pressure entirely behind. This is why her letters home, when she was already
in the United States, still portray her as a generally sweet and obedient daughter.
Sylvia writes to her mother, once she knows she has got a Fulbright Grant to go to

England:

Dearest of Mothers,

. . . You have no idea how wonderful and reassuring it was to talk to you
yesterday! . . . I am so happy, so encouraged . . . Get well fast- can't wait
to see you . .

All my love . . . We 175-76)

Even living in a different country very far from her native Boston, she was
unable to free herself of her deep feeling of guilt because of her ambivalent feelings
for her mother and tried incessantly to please her mother by writing the kind of
letters she knew she would like to receive. Once in Cambridge, Sylvia kept on

writing her highly affectionate letters:

Dearest Mother,

. . . It was so lovely to get your telegram and the wonderful birthday gifts .
. . I must say the best present anyone can give me is a fat typed letter:
all the news from home, . . . I feel so close to you all, as ifI were only a

short drive away. . . (1mm 192)

Living in England was probably hard for Plath. She had to respond to different
expectations and struggle for her own place in literature in a country where she was
absolutely unknown. She tried to get included in the elitist literary circles where she

met her future husband. Ted Hughes was a strong, Dionysian character, a man in

16

love with nature and hunting. One of Plath's friends, Lucie McKee remembers how
Ted was "warm and amusing, but had something to do with contained violence about
him, in the way he expressed himself, his interests", also in the way he spoke about a
tomcat whom be admired for his aggressiveness and prowess in the neighborhood when he
was a child (Alexander 227). Plath needed a man with a powerful and magnetic
personality, and a living mirror where she could see herself reflected. Therefore, he
immediately became her colossus, her Adam. He had a decisive influence in her
writings, dictating the topics she should write about and suggesting to her his favorite

authors:

During the early years of their marriage, Plath adopted Hughes's favorite
writers as her own (Blake, Hopkins, Lawrence, Thomas) . . . and became
interested in subjects he was interested in (ouija, tarot, horoscopes, fertility
myths, exotic plants and animals, the white goddess, arcana). (Axelrod
195)

Hughes also made remarks about Plath's poems becoming his advisor and

instructor:

He became her teacher, opening to her a new vocabulary of words and
animals and earth. He read horoscopes, recounted his 'marvelous colored
dreams . . .' and educated her daily by setting exercises of concentration
and observation. (U roff 34)

He also became the substitute of her lost father and the double she had been
looking for after Otto Plath's death:

Hughes was the most immediate 'daddy' in her life, the nearest 'jealous
god' in that pantheon that gave her life much of its meaning and more of
its anguish. (Axelrod 187)

l7

Plath also internalized her husband's interests and, to some extent, his
"European" identity. She became interested in European history and culture, which we
can see in her multiples references in her poems to W.W.II, Nazi concentration camps,

etc.

The fire makes it precious,
The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,

Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, bumt-out
Germany
(From "Mary's Song" lines 6-11)

It is you the knives are out for
At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,
The hump of Elba on your short back,

The bees have got so far. Seventy feet high
Russia, Poland and Germany!
(From "The Swarm" lines 6-8, 26-27)

At the same time, Plath's descriptions of the landscape changed after she left the
US. for England. Her descriptions becarrre more internal and less physical. In some
occasions she seems to use the English landscape to describe her own feelings and

emotions, to pour herself into the poems:

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

Scorched to the root

My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires
(From "Elm" lines 16-18)

If I could bleed, or sleep!-
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,

18
Dulling and stilling

But colorless. Colorless
(From "Poppies in July" lines 11-15)

There are some critics, nevertheless, who do not think that the British influence
on Plath was significant. Uroff affirrns that the fact of living in a different country was
not remarkable either for Plath or for Hughes. He says: "They lived and worked both in
America and in England; they admit reading and being influenced by both American and
English contemporaries" but, most significantly, "they produced important portions of
their major works as a result of their poetic association." (Uroff 150).

Ostriker insists that Plath's voice was distinctively American until the end of her .
life, as she always tended to the expression of physical and emotional facts (99-100).

Apart from these testimonies and considering Plath's own life, we can see that
the poet was very keen on English literature since childhood and it is sure that her
extensive reading of English writers had an influence in her own writing. She, for

example, wrote to her mother:

. . . from my childhood I built up by reading a feeling for England (I'd
forgotten how rrrany British writers I must have read, but so much here
seems dearly loved already because I've met it before in my reading: the
rooks and tea time from The Cuckoo Clock, the poetry about Granchester
and the Cam, crumpets and scones from TS. Eliot). (Lenezsfleme 192)

Plath's decision to go to England seems to be deeply rooted in her childhood.
Nevertheless, the fact that she met Ted Hughes there would completely change the course

of her life and writing.

TED HUGHES: GOD AND MUSE

l9

Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956 at the St. Botolph's
celebratory party in Falcom Yard. Theirs was a totally passionate encounter and, very

soon, she wrote to her mother about Hughes:

In the last two months I have fallen tenibly in love, W
W I met the strongest man in the world, ex-Carnbridge, brilliant
poet whose work I loved before I met him, a large, hulking , healthy Adam
. . . with a voice like the thunder of God - a singer, story teller, lion and
world-wanderer, a vagabond who will never stop. (My emphasis) Men

Home 233)

Only four months later, in the aftemoon of June 16 (James Joyce's Bloomsday)
in 1956, Sylvia Plath married Ted Hughes. The ceremony took place in St. George the
Martyr, a church a five-minute walk from Ted's London flat. Plath's mother was the only
guest, as Sylvia feared that the college authorities would disapprove it and the Fulbright
Conrission would cancel her scholarship (Stevenson 90). They spent a summer
honeymoon in Spain where Plath already resented having to do the marketing and cooking
as well as the housework (Wagner-Martin 135). It seemed that being married to "the
most wonderful man" was not enough for the young writer who felt that her own time to
write was being threatened.

In addition, in the summer of 1953 Sylvia thought that she was pregnant so that
the plans she had made for the two of them: to be able to achieve success through their

writings, free from responsibilities, seemed ruined. She wrote in her journal:

The horror, day by day more sure, of being pregnant (...) clang, clang, one
door after another banged shut with the overhanging terror which, I know
now, would end me, probably Ted, and our writing and our possible
irnpregnable togetherness. (qtd. in Wagner-Martin 144)

As we can see, Plath saw her potential of being a good writer seriously

threatened by her role as a mother. At the same time, she felt a deep anger towards her

20

husband "for not assuming what she saw as his share of the household burden" (W agner-
Martin 145). Even while working at Smith, and exhausted by teaching, she still had to

perform most of the household chores:

She worried about household duties and cooking, about Ted, and about
her own writing. She had no time to do anything creative. She resented
the fact that Ted did have the time. (Wagner-Martin 149)

This was the period of Ted Hughes's growing success. His first published book,
Wu, had received good reviews and he was completing a second,
mm, which would confirm his growing reputation. He was also finishing a book of
children's stories which had already been accepted for publication. Therefore, he decided
not to look for a job. Hughes's confidence that income from their writing would support
them unnerved Plath, who had been reared to think that the husband should be the
provider. Therefore, Sylvia was usually the one who would look for a job to supplement
their savings. For example, she worked transcribing the dreams of patients, and acting as
receptionist and general office clerk in the psychiatric clinic of Massachusetts General
Hospital. She also worked as secretary to the head of the Sanskrit Department at
Harvard. Later on she held a copy-editing position with the magazine W, for
which she worked in the afternoons doing page layout and editing for special issues. After
the birth of their first child she was happy but very tired too. She wanted to have the
baby and fulfill, in that way, her role as a mother, but taking care of the baby, being a
housewife and trying to get some time to write exhausted her terribly. She especially

resented that she had so little time to write:

The baby's feeding and keeping the house clean, cooking, and W

W, plus my own, have driven me so I care only for
carving out hours where I can start on my own writing. (My emphasis)

(Iatrmflame 384)

21

The first years of their marriage were especially productive for Hughes. There
is no doubt that his wife's constant support and profound admiration contributed to his
own personal success. S.G. Axelrod describes Hughes as a domineering man who could
outdo Plath in wildness and therefore domesticate her (191). In fact, this seems to be
the key for Plath's overwhelming attraction toward the English writer who, at the sarrre
time, represented her own desires of creation phallicized. Nevertheless, Plath's desire
to marry someone whom she could strongly admire, a god or "colossus" conflicted very
soon with her own need to outstand, to shine with own light. According to Axelrod,
Plath saw Hughes as her "male muse" and "god creator" but both images
repelled each other (193). We can also image the mutual jealousy of both writers
competing for success. After a while, Plath's own aspirations would make her unable
to find personal satisfaction in her husband's literary successes despite her desire to help
her husband continue writing full-time that she expressed in her letters to her mother.
This mixture of loathing and envy is expressed in "The Wishing Box" and it is the central

concern of contemporary feminism, according to Janet Malcolm. The critic writes:

The premise of the storyuthat a woman's life can be poisoned, and even
ultimately destroyed, by her feelings of inadequacy in the face of a man's
superior achievement—is as farfetched and remote from observable
experience as the Freudian concept of penis envy. And as true. (85)

Plath's struggles with writing became fused with her envy and resentment of
men. In fact, many women who were trying to write in the 50's and 60's found themselves
thinking that if they did not write well it was their husbands' fault (Malcolm 115-116).
Besides, to maintain home and family left Plath no time for herself, or for her writing, or
even for her relationship with her husband. She would then suffer the typical conflict of
the Fifties of being unable to play too many roles at the same time, of being under

constant stress, which would ultimately contribute to the failure of her marriage.

22

Throughout Plath's life there is a constant struggle between her "inner" and
"outer" selves. When she married Hughes, her husband would become the representation
of her outer public self. Just after meeting him she would feel the immediate urgency to
merge with him, to feel one with him. Once their relationship went wrong, she would
look for a refuge in her inner life, the complex self that the poet portrays best in Ariel.
Something similar happened to her when she decided to quit teaching at Smith College to
dedicate more time to her writing. She would have to submerge her public and acclaimed
teaching self into her private and unrecognized writing self again, trying to find a refuge in
an underworld that she knew it might destroy her.

If we try to interpret the couple's relationship in Freudian terms we have to
mention again Plath's strong dependency on her mother and her difficulty in separating her
own identity from Aurelia's successfully. This circumstance would interfere with Plath's‘
capacity for empathy and for seeing others as they really were. In cases where the
individual has such strong maternal dependency "the lover is idealized, separations are
intolerable; and rejection may be life threatening" (Wedding 255). This seems to be

entirely true in Plath's case and describes with accuracy her feelings towards Hughes.

A WOMAN IN THE FIFTIES

With regards to the influence that living in the Fifties had on the writer, we can
note that Sylvia Plath's Wwas published in January 1963, just some months
before the publication of Betty Friedan's WW- Both authors write
about the failure of the domesticity values of the "Happy Fifties", about the effects on
women of the Cold War ideology, and about the "domestic trap" and the mental disorders
of many women as an expression of their anxiety and dissatisfaction. Friedan explains it in

this way:

23

. . . There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives
as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the
image that I came to call the feminine mystique. I wonder if other
women faced this schizophrenic split, and what it meant. (11)

By the "feminine mystique" Friedan meant a definition and glorificat

ion of the female role that focused exclusively on the woman's sexual and
reproductive functions. Betty Friedan rejected and attacked the feminine mystique mainly
because it discouraged women from making mature choices about their lives and from
developing their talents (Harris 170). Friedan interviewed eighty women at certain crucial
points of their life cycle. These women were profoundly unhappy without knowing why.
Theirs was "the problem with no name" that gave explanation to the female physical and
mental disorders such as anxiety, neuroses, depression, tiredness (what doctors called
. "housewife's fatigue"), sexual problems (frigidity, pregnancy fears), etc.

The basic problem for the American women in the Fifties was that society
conveyed two powerful but contradictory messages concerning the goals that were
acceptable for them. One message was, "Be a wife and mother and gain your fulfillment
"at home". The other was, "Get a job" (Ogden 173).

Friedan's sample was basically composed of two distinct groups: radicalized but
disillusioned college students and discontented, rniddle-class, suburban housewives
(Harris 168). One of the women in the first group was Sylvia Plath who, in her writings,
tells us about her difficulty in adjusting to the social values of the Fifties. Her novel, The
3:11.13: is, in fact, based on the writer's own experiences in the summer of 53 and is also a
product of her maladjustment to the society of the 50's. Plath wrote to her mother: "Boys
live so much harder than girls, and they know so much about life. Learning the
lirrritations of a woman's sphere is no fun at all" Wm 72).

The high rate of emotional distress and breakdowns among women in their

twenties and thirties at that time was caused by what Friedan called "role crisis", that is,

24

women were educated to fulfill a role that did not satisfy them at all. In W
Sylvia Plath explains what this role consisted of and tells us about her personal crisis

through her main character and double, Esther Greenwood:

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.
It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and
toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after
he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then
when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big
dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I
fell into bed, utterly exhausted. (IheBelLIar 68)

This is not a very appealing and promising future for any woman, especially for a
woman like Esther/Plath, who wants to gain experience and know more about life in order
to be a writer. Therefore, after getting this mental picture of what marriage and "personal
fulfillment at home" would suppose for her, Esther starts laughing when Buddy Willard,
her boyfriend in the novel, asks her to marry him.

Plath's negative conception of what marriage makes of women in general and of
women's role after the wedding appear clearly illustrated in her poems as well. In one of

her poems in Ariel she writes:

...Hereisahand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
(From "The Applicant", lines 10-14)

The woman in the poem is just a thing ("it"), a human being without identity. She
has gone through a process of reification by the male dominant society.
Trying to solve the problems which arose through the questioning of their own

identities, many women left their domestic confines and tried to fulfill themselves in the

25

social and political sphere. Plath would not be one of the successful cases as she ended
her life too soon due to insurmountable internal conflicts such as this split over how to

express her identity as a woman.

Janet Malcolm writes about her in the following terms in an extensive article on

Sylvia Plath titled "The Silent Woman":

The history of her life. . . is a signature story of the fearful, double-faced
fifties. Plath embodies in a vivid, almost emblematic way the schizoid
character of the period. She is the divided self par excellence. The taut
sunealism of the late poems and the slack, girls'-book realism of her life
(...) are grotesquely incongruous. The photographs of Plath as a vacuous
girl of the fifties, with dark lipstick and blond hair, add to one's sense of
the jarring disparity between the life and the work. (89)

As Malcolm points out we can clearly see a split in the writer's identity: the

Plath of Lettersjleme, a nice, sweet, obedient Sylvia, projection of the "desire" and
"require" image of the Fifties:

Dear Mum,
. . . I realize now how much you mean to me - you and Warren and
my dear Grampy and Grammy! . . . I love you so.
Williams 60)
Dear Mummy,
. . . I feel very sorry I don't write more often, Mumsy, because your letters
are great substance to me. I nriss you and home and Warren . . .

(letterslzlame 71)

and the Plath of W and the last poems in particular: an aggressive, sour, violent

woman, a submerged and subversive identity:

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own
silence.

(IhEBrJLIar 15)

What a hotchpotch the world was!

26
(Ibiflclllat 92)

A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief
(From "The Couriers" lines 5-6)

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
(From "Lady Lazarus" lines 82-84)

The woman who speaks in these poems is not able to communicate with the

outside world. She is also disappointed with the reality she faces and expresses her
disappointment, first with irony and then with violence.
. Plath's double identity appears more and more evident with time and the
progressive change in Plath's physical aspect illustrates how her internal struggle is finally
solved with the victory of Plath's "dark" self. Meanwhile, the Sylvia of Lettemflemeand
W is remembered by people who knew her as evoking "the soap and deodorant
advertisements of the nineteen-forties and fifties, in which the words 'dainty' and 'fresh'
never failed to appear" (Malcolm 106), on Christmas Eve, 1962, just two months before
her death, Plath is no longer blond and no longer conspicuously clean. Al Alvarez
remembers her like that: "Her hair, . . . was loose. It hung straight to her waist like a tent,
giving her pale face and gaunt figure a curiously desolate, rapt air, like a priestess
emptied out by the rites of her cult . . . her hair gave off a strong smell, sharp as an
animal's" (qtd. in Malcolm 106).

Plath's only novel, completed before the new feminist consciousness had reached
expression, would become, in this way, one of the touchstones for the women's movement
and one of the more clear examples of the growing female dissatisfaction that lay behind
the "mask of placidity" of the American women's postwar generation. At this point, we
can not avoid thinking of Plath's lines in "The Applicant": "Will you marry it?/ It is
guaranteed// To thumb shut your eyes at the end/ And dissolve of sorrow." (My emphasis)

27

( 14-17). Plath's own life as much as her writings sharply illustrates this deep

dissatisfaction and the influence that it had in the shaping of her identity.

PLATH 'S INFLUENTIAL READINGS ABOUT DOUBLENESS

We have just mentioned the writer's struggle to define her own identity and her
propensity to see others as projections of her own fantasies. Such tendencies were not
entirely unconscious for Plath who, from the very beginning of her academic career,
showed her interest on such topics as doubleness and otherness.

Plath's extensive reading about such topic expressed her own initial interest on
the subject but, at the same time, strengthened her original ideas on that topic. The
psychological effect of her readings on her would make her more critical of her own
~ behavior and thoughts. In fact, Plath's constant repetition of the tautology "I am 1"
throughout her writings derives from her inner confusion about who she is in fact. " I am,
I am, I am", repeats Esther Greenwood at the end ofjheBelLlar, and with this obsessive
repetition Plath ends up her novel, apparently letting us know that Esther has recovered
her lost identity.

While at Smith, Plath wrote papers on Thomas Mann's dualisms and Nietzche's
philosophy on opposites. In a very personal term paper written during her senior year at
Smith entitled "The Devil's Advocate", she explains how the conflicts and dichotonries in
Dostoevsky's novels were echoed in her own mind (Axelrod 202). The next semester
Plath used this paper, expanding it into her honors thesis titled: "The Magic Mirror: A
Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky's Novels." Here she used the idea of the
double to explain the enigma of identity and "the fundamental duality of man." (Axelrod
202).

28

Plath treated the idea of the double in Dostoevsky'sjheflretherejmmm
andwe. According to S.G. Axelrod, the importance of her thesis is not in the
ideas that the writer developed there, but in the influence that such readings had on the
shaping of Plath's own personality and on her special way of seeing through polarities.

In order to prepare her thesis, Plath read the two novels by Dostoevsky and also

Hawtlrome's "Monsieur du Miroir," Poe's "William Wilson," Stevenson's WM

Hyde, and Wilde's W. She also read Ernest Sirnmons'

WW and, besides other literary texts, Plath read
psychological, medical and religious studies as background for her thesis. The most

important of Plath's readings were, nevertheless, James Frazer's chapter "The Perils of the
Soul" in W11, Otto Rank's chapter "The Double as Immortal Self' in
Beyqnifisyehelegy, and Freud's "The Uncanny".

In his chapter, Frazer explained how all living creatures have two distinct selves,
an outward body and an inward soul, and how the inward soul may escape through body
apertures and become manifested through dreams, hallucinations, shadows, reflections,
etc. Plath read Frazer's comment about the tribe of the Baganda, who believe that every
person is born with a double. She also believed it but she did not consider such a double
as the traditional soul but as an authentic or creative self (Axelrod 205). These ideas are
clearly shown in Plath's "In Plaster" or in "Face Lift", where we find spatial and temporal

doubles:

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,

And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was.
(From "In Plaster" lines1-2, 7)

For five days I lie in secret,
Trapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.

. . . I grow backward. I'm twenty,

29
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, . . .

I hadn't a cat yet.
(From "Face Lift" lines 17-18, 20-22, 24)

Following Frazer's theories, Plath believed as well that to be alive is to be and to
see double and that death is just the loss of doubleness (Axelrod 205).

Besides Frazer's ideas, Rank's theories about the double were determinant for
Plath in the elaboration of her own symbology. In W, Rank explains that
although in primitive religion the double was considered a symbol of the individual's
"immortal soul", in the occidental civilized culture the double has become, "a reminder of
the individual's mortality, indeed, the announcer of death itself" (qtd. in Axelrod 206). In
her thesis, Plath also explained how for the modern personality type the double represents
the "almost pathological loss of one's real self through a superimposed one," or it may also
represent the evil characteristics of its master presaging his ultimate destruction (qtd. in
Axelrod 206).

These theories, and especially the one that considers the double like the "almost
pathological loss of one's real self through a superimposed one," make us think of the fact
that Plath's original self was a basically Apollonian one who she partially lost due to the
superimposition of a Dionysian one.

In fact, Plath preferred Rank's theory to Frazer's more ancient one and she
explained in one of her letters home how she felt about her readings: "All fascinating stuff
about the ego as symbolized in reflections (nrirror and water), shadows, twins—dividing
off and becoming an enemy, or omen of death, or a warning conscience, or a means by
which one denies the power of death." (Letters Home 146) As I have already mentioned,
Plath tried to find alter egos in the outside world throughout her life and when she tried to
find a double in her husband and he failed her, she could no longer deny the power that

death exerted over her and was dragged into suicide, into notlringness. In this way, Plath

 

30

would confirm with her own example and life her own theory that death is just the loss of
doubleness.

Plath's reading of Freud's "The Uncanny" (1919), contributed also to her
consideration of the double as a rational exanrinator of the self, as an instrument of self-
criticism and change.

We can see plenty of examples in Plath's writings of these three different ways to
see the double: as immortal soul, as harbinger of death and as an instrument of self-
criticism and change:

The double as immortal soul can be seen in the poem titled "The Babysitters",
where Plath speaks about the unimportance of space, the possibility of feeling joined to a
person despite physical barriers:

0 what has come over us, my sister!

I see us floating there yet, inseparable--two cork dolls.

The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock.
And from our opposite continents we wave and call
(From "The Babysitters" lines 28, 41, 43-44)

The double as an omen of death can be seen in "The Lady and the Earthenware
Head". As Uroff says, "this head, a model of her own, seems to have no intellect but it is
a sinister, seductive, even sexual image that she must protect in order to protect herself."

(Uroff 80):

. . . shrined on her shelf, the grisly visage endured,
Despite her wrung hands, her tears, her praying: Vanish!
Steadfast and evil-starred,
It ogled through rock-fault, wind-flaw and fisted wave-
An antique hag-head, too tough for knife to finish,
Refusing to diminish
By one jot its basilisk-look of love.
(From "The Lady and the Earthenware" lines 29-35)

31

Doubleness is also considered threatening in the poem "In Plaster", where the
cast's presumptions of superiority make the trapped self inside hate the cast's virtues and

deny its importance for its own survival:

. . . she'll soon find out that doesn't matter a bit.
I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,
And she'll perish with emptiness, and begin to miss me.

(From "In Plaster" lines 54-56)

’ In other poems like "Morning Song," or "Event", the writer identifies herself
with her own children and the assurance of knowing them so helpless and dependent
makes Plath aware of her importance for them. Here one can see the concept of the

double as a means to gain wisdom and self-knowledge through others.

Apart from these different ways to interpret the presence of a double in Plath's
work, we can see that the obsessive appearance of such a double in rrrany of her writings
is a clear indication of her schizoid personality, her dependence on the outside world and
the impossibility to attain inner stability by her own means. According to R.D. Laing,
schizoid people usually suffer "a failure to sustain a sense of one's own being without the
presence of other people. It is a failure to be oneself, a failure to exist alone" (qtd. in
Holbrook 153). Therefore, individuals who cannot exist by themselves need an object of
identification and if this "rrrirror" in which they have projected themselves is lost they may
perform desperate acts like suicide. Nevertheless, the destruction of themselves or the
obliteration of the people they love is, in fact, a way to attain salvation, a manner to get a
rebirth to a different self. According to Laing, schizoid people "are constantly afraid of
being depersonalized by others", therefore, they prefer to do it themselves before (qt. in

Holbrook 153). The images of rebirth in Plath's writing are overwhelming: the rrrain

32

characters of "Face Lift", "Lady Lazarus" and "Edge" are all good examples of death as

commencement of a new life:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair '
(From "Lady Lazarus" lines 82-83)
The woman is perfected
Her dead

Body wears the snrile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
( From "Edge" linesl-4)

Also in WEsther Greenwood takes a hot bath that is described as a
rebirth (21-22) and after her suicide attempt and the shock treatment she clearly feels that
she is as new woman. The final rebirth to a new life requires the reaffirrnation of the new
identity, that is the reason why Esther needs to repeat to herself: "I am, I am, I am" (199).

The dissolution of the loved ones has also the purpose of salvation.
Nevertheless, before salvation can be r. ‘ red she must reduce everything to nothing. In
fact, according to Laing a schizoid individual " 'destroy[s]' in his mind the image of anyone
or anything he may be in danger of being fond of, out of a desire to safeguard that person
or thing in reality from being destroyed" (qtd. in Holbrook 174). Therefore, by getting
rid of her mother in "Medusa" and of her father in "Daddy", Plath kills them in her mind
to be able to keep them in her heart. Plath "did not kill" Hughes in her mind; that is
perhaps the reason why she could not overcome his separation. Anyway, it is possible
that she could not dissolve her rrrirror before she was able to find another one in which

look at herself.

3 At the end of her life, Plath's struggle between two opposite identities exhausted
her: the Apollonian self of the nice wife and mother and the Dionysian self of the lover,

writer and rebellious daughter exhausted her. Plath was torn between choices and, as a

33

consequence, was not able to piece her self together. Many American women nowadays
experience as well this artificial split in their lives when they have to choose between being
successful as women or good professionals. Plath's schizoid condition made her especially
able to have deep insights about herself and about her condition as a woman in such a
difficult period of time for a woman as the 50's. This is the main reason why her writings
and her thoughts are so contemporary and her personality as a woman-writer so
fashionable. This is also the reason why is still difficult to write about her. Her presence is
too alive in our minds to be able to understand with a certain distance the meaning of her

life and death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Axelrod. Steven Gould- WW
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

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