Plath’s desire to please her mother ran so deep that it paralyzed her, infantilized her. Plath’s mother is often portrayed as the bogey-man of Plath’s life, a prudish judgmental unhappy woman who put unrealistic expectations on her intense daughter. I have written before about this in my various posts about Plath. The sense of unfairness about that runs through the book like an electric current. It is about the ingrained double-standard in the culture at the time (and hell, still true now) – where boys are free, and girls are free but only with huge consequences. In many ways, the book isn’t about clinical depression and suicide at all. It wasn’t until I read it again in my 20s that I really caught onto her social critique, biting and vicious. It has to do with experiencing nothing-ness, emptiness, listlessness. What called to me in the book was its chilly prose, its accurate depiction of a good girl trying to shed her good girl role (one of Plath’s main problems, it was such a huge division in her it could not be bridged), and also – the mesmerizing descriptions of what depression actually feels like.
When she returned home from New York City, the abyss of the summer yawned before her, and she began to tailspin into depression and psychosis.
Plath had also tried to take her own life in the summer of 1953, after a prestigious internship at Ladies Home Journal. Largely autobiographical, it describes the events of the summer of 1953 in the life of a girl named Esther Greenwood, who eventually swallows a bottle of pills and ends up in a mental hospital. I first got into her through The Bell Jar (my review here), her only novel, published posthumously. I have gone through many phases in my relationship to her writing, and in talking to others (I mean the die-hard fans) my trajectory with Plath is in line with theirs. It’s rare that you have a relationship with a writer that lasts so long. Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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