Jessica's review

yes. she's clearly ill, to the mature reader. oddly, when i was first institutionalised, at sixteen, the hospital staff recommended the girls on the unit read it, which i thought was rather like suggesting pyromaniacs should be given boxes of strike anywhere matches. her description of the weight that the future puts upon her (lather, rinse, repeat... until death) became my own.

The case of Sylvia Plath is complicated. At first she seems to be presenting herself in this book as a young woman driven crazy by uptight fifties America. Feminists seemed to agree with that in the seventies. In her poetry you get another perspective in the extraordinary amount of hatred directed against her father (see "Daddy"). What that was all about is hard to judge. In these disillusioned latter days we might assume some kind of abusive relationship but I don't think anyone knows. Then in SP's letters we have another interesting twist. The first version of the book of letters to her mother was edited by her mother and she omitted all the ones which expressed SP's hatred of her mother, unsurprisingly. Also, later, the feminists made the argument that once she escaped her monstrous father his replacement Ted Hughes drove her ctazy. The point of this is to pose the question : I asked myself along with many others what the source of SP's mental illness was, but now I think that's an illegitimate question. She was just mad all her life, and her madness expressed itself in non-rational hatreds and profound self-loathing, and everyone in her life was a series of hooks she could hang these hatreds on. She died in 1962, just before the dawn of the swinging sixties and all that that implies. I often wondered what she would have made of the sudden whoosh of colour and freedom and countercultural expression - but then I think she would have still been mad. Check out "Poppies" or "Elm" for fantastically precise and very scary because brilliant expressions of her sourceless paranoia.

I read it at about 13 and did recognize her illness (and commiserated with her relentless depression in a typical thirteen year old's way). Oddly, though, I don't remember the sex scene.

I do recall stumbling upon R. Crumb a year or two before I was prepared to, though.

:shudder:

paul, you don't seem to have decided that the question of the cause of plath's illness is illegitimate, as you state, you've merely made the decision that you know what the cause was - nothing (or nature, as some would have it). why you imagine that her hatreds were irrational, i can't understand. is it not at least equally possible that her hatred for her mother, father, and husband had a perfectly rational cause? the woman for whom her husband left her killed herself (and her daughter, significantly, with her - something plath went out of her way to prevent [ie, the death of her own children, upon whom she, seemingly, placed no "non-rational" hatreds]), as well. all of the later cover-ups mean something, though i can't say, for certain, what. the question remains on the table.

I heard a guy on the radio talking about headaches and when he'd rules out the obvious causes of specific headache types he was left with your average headache which we all get from time to time, only some people more than others. So why indeed do some people get them more than others? was the question. Well, he says, because some people have headache-shaped brains. This took me aback. But eventually made some kind of sense. We run about looking for reasons and causes constantly - and so we should. They said John Merrick the Elephant Man was born like that because his ma was frightened by an elephant when she was pregnant. Well, they were silly. We now know the real reason. Or maybe we don't. A friend of mine manages a small unit which houses 14 people with varying degrees of schizophrenia so I read a beginner's guide to schizophrenia (insert joke here) and essentially it's a very poorly understood condition. It's even poorly defined and certainly poorly treated. They don't know why people are schizophrenics. maybe they never will.
So maybe there is a point where looking for a reason becomes profitless. You will never find one. In some cases there is no why. Maybe gradually accepting this idea (only for some cases) is me accepting that - on a grander scale - science will never know all the answers. I used to think it would. A slightly less fraught and demanding relationship with rationality, that's what I'm after. But I don't want to overbalance into the hippy/Van morrison vapourising "there ain't no why, there's just is" woollyheadedness.
If you read accounts of SP's latter years you find she disliked quite a number of people and hated not a few. Regarding Daddy, we'll never know if there was any abuse going on, but regarding Mummy, why was she so vicious? Might it not be that SP was a person who developed resentments, dislikes and ultimately hatreds of anyone who came within her purview for any stretch of time?
So what I'm saying is that SP was a person (one amongst many, but she had the great talent)born with a kind of intense free-floating anxiety which would attach itself to situations and persons here and there and turn into hatred and depression. Essentially these uncontrollable states of mind - her "madness" - were arbitrary.
As for Ted Hughes and his two suicide wives, that's a whole sinister story in itself. His own reaction was published as "Crow" which is well worth reading.

again, you start out by saying "we don't know" (a position i agree with, though there are some clues - perhaps she hated her mother for allowing her father to abuse her, for example, and she hated people, later in life, because she was a victim of early abuse. it's textbook...), and end with asserting, definitively ("essentially"), that her "madness" was "arbitrary". i remain with "we can't say for sure, but it looks fishy". some are born ill, some predisposed to illnesses, and some are made ill. some have some combination. which was sylvia plath? we don't know. still, i don't know the sun will rise, later, but it's been doin' it for a while (or has it?! perhaps i've only emerged, this moment, into a consciousness with an entire false history!) occam's razor.

I also remember being particularly scarred by Plath's description of her first sexual encounter. I mean, I always knew it could be bad--but I had never heard of anyone having to go to the hospital afterward. And the explanation in the book about this is very vague. I seem to remember the doctor examining her saying something like "this happens to one in a million" or something like that, but no further eplacnation is given. I'm still not sure what, exactly, happened to poor Sylvia Plath upon losing her virginity but I am certainly glad it did not happen to me.

Not a very appetising subject before breakfast, I'm sure you'll agree, but as I recall, when her hymen was torn she bled and then wouldn't stop bleeding. That was the one in a million thing. I wonder if the immortalised boyfriend ever read the book and recognised himself and, pleased with this literary immortality, pointed the scene out to his children in latter years.

Ewwww. How mortifying. Poor Sylvia Plath!

Some goth band ought to call themselves Sylvia's Hymen.

Without sounding too mystical or primitive I think part of what killed Plath was almost occult in nature. She invoked a muse that she couldn't control and it burned through her like paper through fire and once the poem cycle that would become `Ariel' was done so was she.

i'm gonna call that "too mystical", though i don't really have an iron in the fire. show me her invocation. i shan't say you're mistaken (i've invoked obstreperous intelligences, to my dismay, seemingly), but where does she? of course, the process may not be recorded... but, nonetheless, too mystical.

I used to try to convince my depressed friends not to read The Bell Jar. I was convinced it would make any teenager suicidal. It expressed depression in such a beautiful way. It defined and captured all of my high school angst. The sexual encounter was terrifying. I remembered it clearly but was also too young when I first read it and it wasn't until later I realized you could have sex without ending up bleeding to death in the hospital. My love for the bell jar largely came from own desire throughout high school to be a poet, and I found her combination of madness and art electrifying. I did not read her as mentally ill, because in high school everyone seemed depressed and alienated to varying degrees.