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(Photo: Rollie McKenna) Sylvia Plath in 1959. It has been 46 years since Sylvia Plath
gassed herself to death in her kitchen, and it was worldwide news when
her daughter Frieda Hughes announced that Plath’s 47-year-old son,
Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist in Alaska, killed himself last week.
Why, of all the stories of creative, brilliant people who have
suffered from fatal depressions, does Plath
s tragic legacy resonate so
widely? Here, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter D. Kramer, Erica Jong, Andrew
Solomon and Elaine Showalter offer their thoughts.
- Joyce Carol Oates, novelist
- Peter D. Kramer, “Against Depression”
- Erica Jong, novelist and poet
- Andrew Solomon, “The Noonday Demon”
- Elaine Showalter, professor emerita, Princeton University
Her Reputation Rises, as Others Fade
Joyce Carol Oates, the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of “Dear Husband,” a story collection.
The suicide of Sylvia Plath was and is obviously of enormous
cultural significance because Plath was a brilliant poet — at the time
of her death she was already considered a very important poet and since
her
death, her reputation has risen continuously while others who were
her gifted contemporaries — Anne Sexton, John Berryman, even the
much-acclaimed Robert Lowell — appear to have faded.
Also, Plath wrote specifically about suicide — her own suicide,
much-meditated and plotted — and her much-publicized ill treatment at
the hands of her husband Ted Hughes made her into a feminist martyr of
a kind. (Though Plath herself was contemptuous of feminism and of most
other women.) It is probably not the case that “creative” people commit
suicide to a degree beyond that of the general population but this is
the popular stereotype.
It is known that a suicide in a family may precipitate subsequent
suicides in the family; one can surmise that for the children or
relatives of suicides, especially those who are prominent and whose
suicides have been much dramatized, self-destruction provides an “exit”
that seems ready-made, as it would not be for others. (I cannot comment
on Plath’s and Hughes’s son, because I don’t know his personal
history.)
Ernest Hemingway, who committed suicide at the age of 62, has the
father in his short story “Indian Camp” offer an explanation of an
Indian’s suicide — “Maybe he just couldn’t take it any longer.” A young
person associated with both Plath and Hughes would have had to contend
with the literary-journalist’s equivalent of Tabloid Hell; maybe
he
couldn’t take it any longer. (The kindest response would be a
sympathetic silence on the part of the media.)
Serve the Sufferers
Peter D. Kramer is the author of “Against Depression.”
Suicide is humbling for us, the observers. In the case of Sylvia
Plath, we have all the narrative information anyone could wish: her
prose fiction, her poetry, her correspondence, her journals, and then
the Husband’s, too.
With all this testimony — brave, generous, self-aware, subtle,
forceful — we do not know. Does Ted drive her to it, and his next wife
as well? Or is it progressive deterioration of the brain? (Now that
we’re better at examining them, we can say that the brains of suicides
look very bad.) Both, is the sophisticated conclusion, environment and
genes, social circumstance and biology, cognition and animal drive —
which is to conclude vaguely indeed.
“Of course there are two,” Plath writes in her poem “Death and Co.,”
meaning the wife and the husband — but now one might think of the
mother and the child. Two turns out to be a low estimate.
What we know most about is the horror of suicide, for the ag
ent, for
the survivors. Advocates who speak on these matters say that death from
suicide is about as frequent as death from the common cancers — only a
bit rarer than death from breast cancer, for example — but that while
there are breast cancer centers, for treatment, for prevention, for
research, at many hospitals, there are suicide centers at almost none.
Tonight, that mundane observation seems to me as thoughtful a response
as any to these losses. As doctors, given copious testimony, we should
be able to comment with more wisdom; as a culture, we should to be able
to serve sufferers better.
An Exemplar of Inexorable Fate
Erica Jong is the author, most recently, of ”Love Comes First,” her seventh collection of poems.
Star-crossed lovers always fascinate, and Sylvia Plath and Ted
Hughes were surely star-crossed. Their attraction was fierce and they
both chronicled it with brilliance. Sylvia Plath wrote powerfully of
her attraction to suicide, then killed herself. Ted Hughes was also no
slouch when it came to the pull of mortality (witness his book,
“Crow”).
We are often drawn to characters who seem to be exemplars of the
inexorability of fate, of destiny. And they were such. In their lives,
in their work, they seemed to exp
ress the darkest workings of the
unconscious.
People born to do that are not often steady parents. And we know
that suicidal parents often produce suicidal children. I knew Ted a
little, did not know Sylvia, but was very sad to hear of their son’s
death.
The legend of tragic, fated lovers seldom includes happy children.
The Lure of a Birthright
Andrew Solomon is the
author, most recently, of “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression”
and of the forthcoming “A Dozen Kinds of Love: Raising Challenging
Children.”
Suicide runs in families. It’s not entirely clear to what extent
this is a genetic predisposition, and to what extent having a parent
who has killed himself or herself simply makes the option feel more
readily available, though both are certainly true.
Suicide is the end point of many depressions, but there are plenty
of people who, though acutely depressed, do not become suicidal.
Committing suicide requires a mix of depression and impulsivity; so
much of depression is passive and meek and deactivating. The pain may
be intolerable, but the prospect of doing anything as deliberate as
suicide is overwhelming.
The model of the literary suicide, of the writer whose thrall to
craft is either the consequence or=2
0the cause of most dire depression,
is a frequent one; David Foster Wallace is the latest link in this
sorry chain. Sylvia Plath wrote about depression so explicitly and so
beautifully in “The Bell Jar,” where she described how:
I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
For anyone who has been depressed, that description rings
astonishingly true. She had talent and looks and was married to a great
poet, but these externals cannot assuage that eye-of-the-storm despair.
For a long time, all of Plath’s work (as Virginia Woolf’s) was read
through the lens of her suicide. She is in fact a remarkable poet,
whose writing would warrant our attention even if she had lived her
days out happily taking her children to soccer practice in suburbia.
Now her son has killed himself, after a long battle with depression.
It’s sad to think that in this time of psychopharmacologic al and
cognitive-behaviora l wonders, he was not able to get above his illness.
I do not know what treatment he received or sought, but I do know that
he had a birthright to the dull eye, and to that sadly final way of
dealing with it. Parents who suffer from depression cannot help passing
along that illness.
Those who commit suicide implant the idea that this is a viable
option, but it seems likely
that Nicholas Hughes was beset by demons he
can rightly call his own. And every life that is lost to suicide is
tragic, be it associated with poetry or not.
A Rare Genius
Elaine Showalter is professor emerita of English at Princeton University and the author of “A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.”
Sylvia Plath, who killed herself at the age of 30, was one of the
great American poets of the 20th century. No other poet in English
except Keats, and no American poet, produced so much enduring work in
such a brief lifetime.
Plath’s ambition to become what she called “the Poetess of America”
and her fierce preparation to fulfill that ambition added to the unique
intensity of her life and legend. Plath’s poetry and fiction, appearing
during the decades when women were demanding liberation from secondary
lives, spoke to its readers with searing immediacy. Our sorrow at the
waste and loss of a brilliant writer, and our anger at the restrictions
and prohibitions Plath faced as a woman artist, fueled her legend.
In short, Plath was not just “talented and creative” but a rare
genius. Her story will continue to compel attention for a very long
while.
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