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sylvia plath and
the Falsity of the suicide myth
My image of Sylvia Plath (n. 1932), is
draped in a false suicide myth – like
Marilyn Monroe and James Dean – relentlessly
repeated by the voracious literary
and media machines. It is true that she
killed herself, in 1963, at the age of 30,
in a frigid February in Primrose Hill,
London, in the place she dreamed of living
– a flat formerly inhabited by the poet
Yeats. But she didn’t only die; she lived
and wrote. She had just divorced Ted
Hughes, a poet enthralled by astrology
and the occult, who was later accused of
thwarting her literary attempts, even
though he did publish her poems, a diary,
stories and correspondence. Like Dylan
Thomas, another author she admired,
Sylvia was born on October 27, in Boston.
She was young and tulip-skinned with
quick, restless hands that could not disguise
a tracery of delicate blue veins.
I envision her speeding on a bicycle over
a mantle of dry leaves or leaping over stones
as one bestriding a fish. I hear her obsessively
laughing in metallic bursts with the
water at her waist, when love, overwhelmingly
material, comes too late in “bits of
sweetened blood.” I see the shadow and
light that made her depart, not only because
lovers are not bonded forever, but because
her feet were veiled by the shroud of a
hollow world and her eyes were hollowedout
orbs. She is there studying and reading,
turned in on her writing and the words
and gestures of others who were absent and
fated not to return.
Sylvia in her negative narcissism and
overwhelming talent did not deem herself
sufficient. Yet she believed she was a
genius and said so in a letter to her mother.
She rationalized her need to escape and
yearned to write with “more inventiveness
than God.” She sought the comforting crib
By AnA mArques GAsTão
Sylvia Plath
of long-lost paternal warmth, and believed
that the world was driven by hard work
and dreams; she heard footsteps and voices
and was inhabited by lunar cries: “If I
sit still and don’t do anything, the world
goes on beating like a slack drum, without
meaning.” (Journal, 2/25/1956).
Like Faust, she knew that there was a
“quagmire at the foot of the mountain,”
yet she could not bear the draining toil her
work demanded. She left her life behind
with no soothing balms or purges; the
white lily of her sublimely ferocious pencil
describing a wounded body with biletinged
tears and words from a bottomless
abyss. As in the Bell Jar, her seeming selfrevelations
were, in reality symbolic, colloquial
and pregnant with metaphors and
transformed her mal-adjustment and
strangeness into something that did not
belong to her. And that is why she allowed
herself to depart and chose to write “in
line with the Poundian legacy between
emotion and intellect” (Mário Avelar, Sylvia
Plath, o rosto oculto do Poeta com uma antologia
poética bilingue, Edições Cosmos, 1997), and
then die: “O my God, what am I. That these
late mouths should cry open. In a forest of
frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.” (“Poppies
in October” 1962)
If anyone can actually be a poem, Sylvia
Plath was Lady Lazarus, the title of a poetic
monologue written eleven days after Daddy
in October of 1962, that talks about once
again being begrudgingly brought back
from the brink of death: “Dying/Is an art,
like everything else, I do it exceptionally
well.” The verses are pervaded by pain,
wit, and irony and pierced through and
through by a kind of morbid joy, a sulphuric
clamor, and haughtiness that the
spoken word brings out: it is a work that
must be heard – not merely read. As Maria
Filomena Molder points out in A Imperfeição
da Filosofia (Relógio d’Água, 2003), in a
reference to a text by Paul Valéry, Lazarus
“only comes back to life because he is
still alive.” He is not a dying figure but a
Christ figure.
Lady Lazarus is the account of a crucifixion.
After death, there is a revival. Skin, bones,
knees, hands, scars, and the crown of gold
are the symbolic elements that populate
the spiritual path the fictional account
details. In an archetypal approximation of
the language of the depths, but with
irresolute duality, the poem ends in a
labyrinthine web of red hair. Sylvia rises
from the ashes like the Phoenix – from
the quagmire of nausea to a kind of occult
eschatology. She has let herself be dragged
to a better place perchance, where time
no longer exists.
Parallel no. 6 | FALL | WINTER 2011 79
CORBIS/ VMI