In 1983, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded to American poet and writer Sylvia Plath, an anthology of poems edited by her husband, Ted Hughes, the year before the award. It is difficult to say whether this honor and this work born by the hands of posterity still have significance for Plath, because twenty years have passed since Plath's death. In February 1963, the coldest winter in Britain in a hundred years, Plath turned on the gas in the early morning of winter. Her head was in the kitchen oven when she was found, and she sealed the gaps in her two children's rooms with towels, tape and cloth.
Sylvia Plath
In an investigation conducted a few days after Plath's death, she was identified as having died of carbon monoxide poisoning. This succinct statement may not answer what happened to Plath for those who cared about Plath at the time. For readers who now touch and know Plath, it is no longer difficult to understand her thirty-one years of life that ended in tragedy, even if we are unwilling to admit it or create an image of a genius poet who has been associated with melancholy since childhood, but cannot avoid the trauma she experienced at different stages of her life. These traumas became an integral part of the poet and her work, and at many moments she struggled to fight them, trying to escape to its outside like a hood.
Plath's tombstone
Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in October 1932, where her father was a professor of entomology and biology at Boston University, a German father. She had a younger brother three years younger than herself, and after the birth of his brother, Plath moved with his family to a seaside town called Winthrop to live with her maternal grandparents, when Plath was four years old. In an essay later included in Johnny Pynick and the Dream Sutra, Plath wrote about his memories of living there, "The landscape I saw as a child was not the earth, but the end of the earth—the cold, sea-soaked hills on the Atlantic shore."
Recalling the sea when he was a child, Plath wrote down his inner feelings at that time, "I kept the hatred in my heart, became annoying, angry, and was a sad seaside urchin... I felt the wall of my skin, I was me, that stone was a stone. My state of beautiful integration with the things of this world is over." This sad mood may be related to the death of his father. When Plath was eight years old, her father died of diabetes. Also in " Johnny Pynick and the Dream " , Plath wrote in an autobiographical short story about the many intimate episodes between the girl Alice and her father. After her father fell ill, Alice visited her father for the last time and did not receive a response from him, "she felt lost, betrayed, and slowly turned and walked out of the room".
Johnny Pinick and the Book of Dreams is a collection of her short stories and essays published in 1977 after Plath's death. The novels, almost all based on Plath's private life at different times, are not arranged in strict chronological order, like the compiler spreading out her hands and scattering the fragments left behind by the deceased, connecting her childhood and family life, college years and marriage experiences in an anonymous way. They can be seen as layers of self-portraits of the author, containing multiple divided selves: a sad, stubborn girl in childhood, with endless imaginations of the world. College was like being caught in a vacuum, wrapped in feelings of vulnerability and confusion. After becoming a wife and mother, the center of her life became her six-month-old child, she hoped that her husband, who was a writer, would sell the script, and worried that his husband would abandon her when he became famous. This is the story written in the short story "The Day of Success", and the protagonist does not feel secure in marriage, which really happens to the writer himself.
Two years after his father's death, Plath moved with his mother and maternal grandparents to the inland town of Wellesley. It was her true farewell to her father and childhood, she wrote, "After my dad died, we moved outland. The first nine years of my life closed themselves in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, outdated, a beautiful white legend circulating everywhere." After completing high school locally, Plath went to Smith College in Massachusetts in 1950. In her junior year, she was invited to be a guest editor of Miss Miss, a women's fashion magazine that also publishes short stories by writers, on which Plath once published a novel about a girl trying to escape her current life through her imagination.
While working at Miss, Plath spent a month in New York. What happened during this time was later written into her novel "Bell Jar". In the novel, Esther is enduring the sweltering summer in New York, overwhelmed by the extravagant atmosphere of fashion culture and the indulgent peers in it, and she feels that she can't control anything, "because it doesn't matter where I sit... I sat under the same bell-shaped glass cover, tormenting in the sour air I spit out myself."
Perhaps because of the protagonist's state of nothingness, The Bell Jar is seen by critics as a Salinger-style novel. Turning back the coordinates of the novel's history to the present, "Bell Jar" is quite similar to the contemporary Irish writer Sally Rooney's story about the emotional life of young people. The difference is that Sally Rooney sees emotional life as a tiny, intersecting field of class identity and power relations that young people first step into before they step into the broader social sphere. Esther in "The Bell Jar" sees it as a dispensable concoction in a boring life - since a boy comes up to talk to him, why not try to talk to him and sit down?
For those who live in a bell jar, it is not easy to return to the outside world. Esther in the novel soon faces a mental crisis, which the writer himself has experienced. In 1953, Plath attempted suicide several times and was taken to the hospital for six months of treatment. After coming out of the hospital, she returned to school and graduated from Smith College in 1955 with a thesis on Dostoevsky's research, and she was awarded a new scholarship to continue her studies at a women's college at Cambridge University.
Compared to Plath's poetry, her novels have not received much attention. Published in January 1963, Bell Jar was the only novel she published during her lifetime. Plath's approach to the work is peculiar, "It's an autobiographical apprenticeship, and I can only release myself from the past by writing this novel." She used writing the novel as a self-healing, wanting to escape the bell and seal the "dark, desperate, and disillusioned days."
Plath and two children
From 1959 to the end of 1962, around the time when he wrote The Bell Jar, Plath's life underwent many changes. In December 1959, after moving to many parts of the United States, Plath and her husband Hughes moved back to England. In April 1960, their first child, Frida, was born, and her first book of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems, was accepted by the publishing company, and she underwent a miscarriage, an appendectomy, and a grant to write The Bell Jar. In January 1962, his son Nicholas was born, and Plath's life was left with only three things: taking care of the children, taking care of the housework, and writing the novel. During this time, she discovered that Hughes was cheating, and in September after writing "The Bell Jar", Plath separated from Hughes.
His marriage to Hughes was a controversial event in Plath's life. The two met at an event in 1956 because of poetry, and married four months later. Plath's death brought Hughes much infamy , but it did not have much impact on Hughes' life and career, and he was regarded as one of the finest poets of his generation, and was awarded the title of Poet Laureate in 1984. He also became the executor of Plath's literary legacy, participating in the publication of Ariel, the posthumous work that really made her poetic world take it seriously.
In the private conscience, there should still be a clear boundary between literature and morality, and it is difficult to shake the accumulated "literary monument"—even if lies and other unclean things are buried under the surface of this monument.
After the separation, Plath returned to London alone with his children and rented the apartment where Yeats had lived. She sees this as a good sign, but this cold winter is not good. Her depression relapsed, water pipes froze in a house without a heating system, dirty water kept coming out of her bathtub, and she had to queue up to buy candles to deal with power outages.
Perhaps for normal people, this winter is barely manageable, considering Plath's depressive state, normal loses its reference meaning. Instead, she burst into astonishing creativity, completing many of the poems that would later be included in Ariel. In a radio transcript to the BBC, she noted that the poems had in common "all written around four in the morning – the silent, blue, almost eternal hour before the rooster, the hour before the baby cries, the hour when the milkman makes glass music when he places the bottle". Her vision for this collection of poems is to start with "love" and end with "spring."
If you skip most of the poems in Ariel and read only the first "Morning Song" and the last "Winter", you might think that this collection of poems is composed of soft love and vague reverie for spending the winter, "Morning Song" is written to his children: "Love clockworks you, like a fat gold watch / The midwife whips the soles of your feet, and your sudden cry / Settles in the elements." The last lines of "Winter" are: "Will the hive survive?" Can gladioli / successfully store the flame / and enter the new year? / How will those Christmas roses taste? / Bees are waddling. They tasted spring. ”
They are the seemingly peaceful ends of the psalms, and their middle is filled with Plath's angry, desperate voices. At four o'clock in the morning, before the world is about to awaken and go about its business as usual, the poet brings out his spiritual world, tormented by depression and distress, often with the shadow of death: "Death / is an art, like everything else." / I'm doing an extraordinary job. "In any case, I don't have much hope for gifts this year. / After all, I'm still alive, and it's an accident. ("Birthday Present")
It is difficult for her to do these things during the day, when she has to take care of her children and deal with the problems that winter brings on her own.
Plath dedicated Ariel to his children. Less well known is that she has written several fairy tales and children's poems for her children, one of which is called "It Doesn't Matter Suit." According to Plath's diary, the fairy tale was written on or before September 1959, shortly before the birth of her first child, Frida. In the story, a seven-year-old boy named Max discovers that everyone around him has a suit, and they wear different suits when they do different things. Max wished he had a suit that he could wear all year round no matter what he did. Later he received an anonymous package, and when opened, inside was a mustard yellow suit. Max wore it to school, skiing, fishing... Do whatever he wants.
The story does not say where the package came from, and its mailer was Plath. Struggling with the bell jar trapped above her head since childhood, Plath perhaps knows how much courage and confidence one needs to fight prejudice from the bottom of one's heart and the world around her, and she invented this clear, diamond-sturdy coat to protect the soon-to-be child from living their own life in stride.
More than forty years after Plath's death, her son Nicholas committed suicide. Her daughter Frida became a poet and artist, publishing poetry books and children's works. She loves to share animals and natural scenery on social networking sites, and she has raised several dogs and owls, and created many owl paintings. In her mother's collection of poems dedicated to her and her brother, there are two poems that also write about owls, and the one "You are" is like this -
Like a clown, happiest when you stand upside down,
Feet pointing to the stars, head is the moon,
It has fish-like gills. A common sense
The thumbs down like a dodo.
Wrapped in itself, like a spool,
Dragging your black shadow, like an owl.
Speechless, like a piece from the Fourth of July
Turnips that were put until April Fool's Day,
Oh Ascension, my little bread.