More on Sylvia Plath

As carbon monoxide took her solitarily lived life at the age of 30, Sylvia Plath, brilliantly and beautifully talented, finally felt at peace before her last breaths, making the choice to end her constant turmoil and abuse she daily faced. Her greatest works stemmed from extreme and devastating conditions, touching many and pulling unspeakable words out of the brains of today's youth. Known as an melancholy person with elegiac pieces, she, like most similar writers, suffered intense childhood trauma, with her abusively strict father passing away while she was 8 years old. Regardless, her brilliance carried her through Smith College, graduating Summa Cum Laude and taking her through a scholarship experience in Cambridge, England. Here she met her soon to be abusive husband, a British poet named Ted Hughes, who reportedly beat her days prior to her miscarried second pregnancy. With culture's bias against women, especially in her time of writing in the fifties and sixties, her talent and inventiveness was only awarded posthumously in 1981, in the form of a Pulitzer prize. As a youngster she found comfort in journaling and once finally old enough she published some of these early writings and won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950, and graduating in 1955 after a single suicide attempt. She then continued her career at Cambridge where she met and married Ted Hughes. After finding out that he was cheating on her she fell into a deep depression in 1962, and was left on her own to manage her broken life and young children Frieda and Nicholas. These tragedies bolstered the darkness behind her semi autobiography, The Bell Jar, written in 1963, as it chronicles one young woman's descent into insanity and madness. The same year Sylvia Plath begins to write her final letter to her therapist and friend, while planning her demise. Although she had little work published by herself, she is a widely known and beloved poet who reaches many with her haunting yet controversial diction in her only book. Her ex-husband was left to publish arguably her most famous work, a set of poems called Ariel which hosts several of her most famous poems including Lady Lazareth and Daddy. Her feelings were so deep that she successfully put into words the depth of her thoughts, but this may have cost her her own life. If there was one thing that Sylvia Plath was irrevocably committed to, that would be an attachment to her individuality and isolation, something that made her a terrible poster housewife - which comes to every mind when you think of a woman's lifestyle in the ‘50s. Regardless, she would not consider herself a feminist, as the derogatory connotations society has placed on the word continues to prompt everyones sprint in the other direction today. In reality, feminism is, and has always been, the advocation and belief in equal rights, opportunity, and pay for women. Prompting these radical ideals, The Bell Jar among other literary works like The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique introduced more specific and silenced female opinions like the desire to continue working even after the men got back from World War II, or challenging the common notion that females were genetically and naturally inferior to men. Although the suffragettes and abolitionists joined together in similar factions, overall we feminists moved aside during the 1950’s, making room for the Civil Rights Movement, and using the example set before us to found the third wave of feminism.

Consciousness-raising groups began to reheat feminist ideas in the early sixties by encouraging and amplifying “personal-storytelling to spotlight sexism” as Michelle Lee (1) accurately puts it. Gathering activists, Betty Friedan and Sylvia Plath’s books pushed many towards the still-active NOW movement, (National Organization for Women) who protested and established task forces campaigning for equal rights and against abortion laws. All of a sudden, women in the United States began to feel fulfilled, passionate, and heard, thanks to the stark transition from housewife to feminist led by activists, protesters, and authors.

After the publishing of The Bell Jar in 1963, the female transition was beginning to change American Society, as we began to not only recognize but fight for our personal autonomy, Vanessa Lamb claims. Sylvia Plath reached many and began to reveal female oppression in a way that had never been thought of or even published, as her heroine wanted a career rather than a marriage, which helped many women realize they felt the same way.