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The Poetry and Prose of Sylvia Plath 163
painful. Certainly interviews which described her as an “attractive
young suburban matron . . . in a neat oatmeal colored suit of wool
jersey . . . a living realization of every young college girl’s dream” must
have been discouraging.
One of Plath’s last works “Three Women: A Poem for Three
Voices,” which appears in Winter Trees, is set in a maternity ward
and seems to celebrate, in part, fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood
along with acceptance, or perhaps resignation, to a women’s domestic
identity. It concludes, “I am a wife . . . The city waits and aches. The
little grasses . . . Crack through Stone, and they are green with life.”
Again, Plath echoes Virginia Woolf: “And now with some pleasure
I find that it is seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage
meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and
haddock by writing them down.” 9 Shortly after this 8 March 1941
entry, Virginia Woolf weighted with stones, walked into a tributary
of the Thames to drown.
Like Woolf, Plath made desperate efforts to balance on the “razor
edge” of the opposing forces of life and death. Kali-like, Sylvia Plath’s
poetry embodies the profound interrelationship of destruction and
creation. Whether or not she could have moved toward a strong
affirmation of life as did Anne Sexton in Live or Die is a question her
readers will never be able to answer.
A. Alvarez in his memoir of Sylvia Plath argues that she was by
nature a risk-taker and that her suicide was her last gamble: “Having
worked out the odds were in her favor, but perhaps, in her depression,
not much caring whether she won or lost. Her calculations went
wrong and she lost.” 10 Alvarez points out that Plath left the doctor’s
number near her, that the au pair girl was due to arrive early in the
morning, that the man who lived below was an early riser. Plath could
not have realized that the gas that suffocated her would sedate him so
heavily that he didn’t hear the frantic knocking of the au pair girl or
that this delay would cost her her life. Yet, the moment she decided
to turn on the gas jet, an irrevocable chain of events occurred which
caused the “jet blood” of poetry to stop forever.
Sylvia Plath was one of the first American women writers to
refuse to conceal or disguise her true emotions; in articulating her
aggression, hostility, and despair in her art, she effectively challenged
the traditional literary prioritization of female experience. In addition
to being a novelist and poet, she was a pioneer and pathfinder.