Sylvia Plath: DV Victim and What it Means

Taking Genres in Creative Writing has been an inspirational class overall for me while attending higher education. Not only has it brought out my finest poetry so far, it has inspired me in the way I want to write about tortured individuals. I've touched on Woolf and Poe and will eventually circle back to them again; but I completely forgot about Plath.

Literally a poet, and my poetry that resembles my trauma was what made me think to bring awareness to this issue, and Plath's poetry was known for her trauma showing up within the very lines--and it still took me this long to bring her up.

Plath was abused and she quite literally cried for help in her poetry.

We focused in class on how Plath was suicidal. We focused how her husband cheated on her. What we didn't focus on was that Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's husband, repeatedly beat her and told her he wanted her dead.

This is provided by evidence of writings that Plath had provided her therapist--one of the beatings reportedly causing Plath's miscarriage of her second child.

Plath had kept detailed journals of her life since she was eleven, and after her suicide, Hughes destroyed her last journal. Her issues with Hughes show up in a handful of poems, but one where she relates to suicide and her marital problems with Hughes shows up in her poem, "Daddy".

It's said that the majority of Plath's final poetry collections all reference the sort of abuse she was going through with Hughes and became her most famous works.

Plath had also been raped while at college. Consensually agreeing to intercourse with an odd man that had been harassing women, Plath was then horrifically raped and physically abused by this man. This was after her first suicide attempt and she had been rejected from a prestige writing class, so her mental stability is definitely in question on whether she could have provided consent in the first place--but even when revoking it, she was physically harmed and that did not stop this man.

The fact of her rape had been recounted by her best friend who told the story when analyzing one of Plath's works, "Ariel" where she believes Plath was referring to the assault.

The Bell Jar, Plath's semi-autobiography, also contains a fictionalized story of what happened. This is major evidence to trauma appearing in art--but Plath seemed to soak it up like a sponge and use it specifically for her art. She even continued to go out with her rapist, which raises so many more questions and red flags.

Next, there is still the study on Plath's mental state in general. First, her symptoms match several different disorders. It all ties back to Major Depressive Disorder, but there are also contradictory factors such as potential neuropathy and psychopathy--which are two contrasting symptoms according to psychology today. There is also the question of Manic-Depression, where the depression is so bad that there are also spurts of mania throughout the depression; this can be related to but is not the same as bipolar or Borderline Personality Disorder.

Since Plath was alive about 60+ years ago, the idea of Borderline Personality Disorder was still unheard of and it can make one wonder if Plath was BPD due to the childhood trauma of losing her father at a young age--but there still isn't much evidence to back that up. Plath's symptoms are so broad that it makes it difficult to name just one potential disorder.

Some parts of Plath's life makes sense with BPD. Having her first recorded suicide attempt being at twenty, that's usually the pique of BPD and also the different anxieties, major depression, and reckless behavior such as continuing to date one's own rapist after knowingly being raped all match the criterion of BPD and is not a far-fetched answer.

Regardless of the potential prognosis, Plath was a deeply disturbed and traumatized individual whose works and death have caused an etching in history, the literary world, and feminism.

And her abuse from her husband shows up in the majority of her works from the time she married Ted to her last work before she took her own life.

Sources Abuse and other background to Plath's death and works: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/11/unseen-sylvia-plath-letters-claim-domestic-abuse-by-ted-hughes

The account of Plath's rape and the reaction to such: https://thelondonmagazine.org/article/plaths-rapist/

Psychology journal (NLIM) trying to desperately diagnose Plath: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC539515/