After writing three biographies of Sylvia Plath, what more could I possibly say about her suicide? Yet suicides, even when notes are left, provoke endless questions about what happened and what might have made a difference that would have saved a life. Then, too, suicides vary not only in significance from one person to another, but also, in Plath’s case, reflect the very different circumstances that separate her suicide attempt in 1953 from her second fatal one nearly a decade later.
In the summer of 1953, she had just returned from a hectic and harrowing month in New York City. She had expected to be named fiction editor at Mademoiselle but instead was given the managing editor post that required an intense involvement in the business of publishing, dealing with writers and deadlines, and the expectations of her boss, that Plath found overwhelming. New York City had been thrilling, but it has also been enervating at a time when the nation seemed especially bloodthirsty, bent on executing the Rosenbergs for espionage—an appalling prospect made worse by the indifference of Plath’s contemporaries, exemplified by that yawning beauty in The Bell Jar, who says nonchalantly that she is glad that they will be electrocuted.
The publishing/literary world of New York City seemed fraudulent, Plath wanted to tell her high school teacher who had inspired her writing ambitions. Even worse, she began to regard herself as a fraud. Weeks went by at home, and she could not write, could not do much of anything. Her application to a summer writing class at Harvard had been rejected. She no longer felt special, no longer able to fulfill the high expectations of her mother, of her friends and teachers. Instead, she thought of herself as a burden to them, and brutally administered shock treatments had provided no relief.
In this fraught state, no longer having faith in herself, she crawled into the space underneath her house and swallowed the pills that she expected would end her misery. She had left a note for her mother, but it told a lie: She said she was going for a long walk and would not return anytime soon. Days later when her brother Warren heard sounds that led him to that under-the-house tomb, he dragged her out, half-dead. Plath revived, but the prognosis was grim. The staff at two hospitals could not relieve her depression, and when therapist Ruth Beuscher made her observations, she determined that Plath was still suicidal.
Only gradually, as Beuscher earned her patient’s trust, did Plath recover. Beuscher was new at the business of treating patients and involved herself in Plath’s life in ways that were deemed unorthodox and that some biographers have criticized. My own view is that without Beuscher, Plath might not have been able to resume her life and writing. As it turned out, she returned to Smith College on a more relaxed schedule and gradually restored her faith in herself.
So far as I have been able to determine, Plath never felt any shame about her suicide attempt. Certainly she regretted the grief she caused her mother and others, but she did not regard the effort to die by her own hand as an unworthy act. Her letters show as much. She repeatedly referred to herself as a Stoic. As an undergraduate, she had read Marcus Aurelius, who had affirmed that suicide was a viable option, even a noble choice when circumstances made life intolerable and no longer susceptible to the ministrations of reason.
A decade later, after significant success as a poet, after a heady marriage with fellow poet Ted Hughes had broken down, in the midst of a bitterly cold British winter with power outages, with two very young children to care for and without a female circle she had hoped to fashion into a salon, exhausted by flu, on drugs that may have had a chilling impact on her psyche, and in the overflow of creating poetry that Plath announced as great—not only to her mother but to Hughes and her champion-critic, Alfred Alvarez, Plath quite deliberately decided to end her life, securing (she believed) her children from the harm of gas escaping her oven, where she had put her head in as far as it would go. Because the gas was so powerful in the ovens of those days that she would have lost consciousness and effectively died in less than an hour, it seems highly unlikely that her final act was a plea for help.
Why would a woman with two children she loved, writing at the peak of her poetic powers, want to die? That poetry had been the result of intense work in the early morning hours before her children awakened. It had been fueled by coffee and pills that kept her going and also depleted her. How long could she maintain that pace? She was seeing her doctor on an almost daily basis. Otherwise, she felt cut off, even forced to use a public call box after months of being unable to obtain a private line for her home.
Long before her last act, Plath had declared that marriage and children were not enough. They were the necessary but insufficient condition of her continued creativity. Assessing her perilous state, her doctor believed she should be institutionalized. She agreed, but then concluded that another stay in an asylum would deprive her of the independence on which her poetry had been founded. A decade earlier, she had Ruth Beuscher to rely on, but no one like that was at hand. Deeply read in psychology, in both Freud and Jung, Plath dreaded how the psychiatric professionals would treat her. She would become a patient and learn the dependent behavior of patients. Read Plath’s story, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” and you will understand Plath’s horror derived not only from her own institutionalization but also from what she had learned by working part-time in a mental institution and taking notes on suffering patients.
So for Plath, suicide became, it seems, the Stoic way out. At a breaking point, anticipating a confinement that would destroy the very conditions of her creativity, she decided that ending her own life seemed not merely a viable option, but a reasonable one—a conclusion very much at odds with a psychiatric consensus that sees all suicidal ideation as illness.
I cannot prove what amounts to a reading of her state of mind, but this is as close as I can come to making sense of what happened to Plath. To me, it recalls what Norman Mailer put so well when he contemplated Marilyn Monroe’s own final act: “The unspoken logic of suicide insists that an early death is better for the soul than slow extinction through a misery of deteriorating years.” He does not leave it there, any more than I can. Like the Monroe of Mailer’s conjectures, Plath also “leaves in mystery.”