Dying is an Art.

I woke up thinking about Sylvia Plath this morning and how she disappointed me furiously later on in my fandom, and it seems that I’m still not sure what to do with that disenchantment – so I thought maybe I’d try spilling it out onto my blog to see what happens, since I tend to figure stuff out if I just start writing about it, rather than thinking, since thinking in my head where there’s no organization (or “delete” button) often leads to trouble.  So here goes.

As an English major and aspiring writer back in the early college days, I felt like Plath's darkly clever poetry and sinister wit could invigorate my all-too-often parched spirit like warm water revitalizes dried yeast.  The biting criticism she grew up with, the absentee father figure, her astute observations and weary wear on society and current events, and the unique way she could re-interpret and twist the English language, all added up to the perfect collection of poems for me to indulge in, over and over again.  I even named my cat after her.

But as an English major in college, you only read her poems.  You don’t read The Bell Jar, because if you took regular English in high school, that’s where you’re supposed to read it.  I was reading The Tempest and Crime and Punishment in high school because I was in the advanced-placement English course, so I had skipped The Bell Jar, and as a kid I wasn’t much of an avid reader other than what they told me to read in school, unless it was something particularly special or stupid that I’d read over and over again, like The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking.  I was much more into watching movies and television shows – no surprise there, given what I decided to major in later on in life.  But I was always very aware that I was missing out on some great mental adventures and fantastic mind-movies by not having read as much as my friends did growing up, so years later I began an avid readership of everything I felt like I’d missed out on, and The Bell Jar was near the top of my list, because of my found affinity for Miss Sylvia's poems.

I hadn’t seen her biographical film yet (a superbly fascinating portrayal of the writer by Gwyneth Paltrow, by the way), so I had nothing but her poems to lead me by the hand into the most personal and autobiographical prose she ever wrote.  By the time I’d finished The Bell Jar, I hated her.  No, I despised her.  I felt like she’d exploited my own feelings by inviting me up into her world like a close sister who had grown up in a similar house, and then tossed me off the roof by revealing an ugly truth behind all those poems.

Talk about having a colossal slab of talent, middle-class upbringing, opportunity, a contract with The New Yorker, and a multiple book deal being handed to you on a silver platter – and then you kill yourself.  When I was reading that book, I had just lost my job among other things, was feeling completely helpless and hopeless after every remaining shard of my self-esteem had been completely shattered and scattered to the wind, and I was trying to survive on a daily basis by taking it one tiny step at a time, even though I didn’t feel like I even had a ground beneath me to walk on.  So: Really, Sylvia?  YOUR life isn’t worth living?  What does that make MINE?

When I would tell people how pissed off I was after reading The Bell Jar, they’d inadvertently start to defend Sylvia Plath, explaining that she was always a bit “off” and obsessed with death since childhood.  That she was depressed.  That she was mentally ill.  That I couldn’t know what else was going on with her by the time she decided, at age 30, to seal herself off from her sleeping children with wet towels and thrust her head into the oven like a whiny mottled housewife looking for attention.  Screw all of that!  In my mind, and in my own dazed and jaded opinion, she had so much more going for herself than I’d ever had in all the combined years of my own life, and then she decides it isn’t enough to live on?  So how am I supposed to take that from the woman whose poems inspired me, lifted my spirits in sisterly camaraderie, and in their own weirdly dark and tragic way, offered me hope because someone else seemed to be just as self-indulgent, self-pitying, and inwardly reflective (read: narcissistic) as I was, but somehow became recognized and successful in the world, despite all of those shortcomings - or better yet, because of them?

So Lady Lazarus was finally dead to me.  I do still love her for offering me the opportunity to indulge in her poetry when I really needed those words, and for how she allowed me to identify with her just by sharing the most revealing, exposed, stripped down, completely naked parts of her heart and mind, which in turn clothed and warmed my own heart and wrapped an airy, lightweight scarf around my own wicked, horror-filled brain.  But by the time I’d reached my own worst personal hell due to circumstances both self-induced and environmental, I was desperately cold, bitter, and in danger of spiritual hypothermia, and I think I realize now that having read Sylvia Plath’s true story and knowing what she finally did with all that personal tragedy in her life, I could have reacted to it in only one of two ways:  I could have decided that it would be nothing for me to go out in a whimper just like her, or I could chuck the book across the room, close my eyes in satisfaction at the loud “thump!” it made when it hit the wall, and write her off in my head exactly the same way she wrote herself off a cliff. 

So I chose the latter, more dramatic option (of course), and maybe that was just one more of the countless “small events” that contributed to my recovery, and I should probably thank her now for so extremely pissing me off.  I feel awful for her and for the fate she was destined to decide for herself.  She was only 30, for chrissakes – old enough to have her shit together, but young enough not to really know any better.  Her children and even Ted Hughes still speak of her affectionately, and she does continue to live on in the hearts of impressionable high school girls and 20-something tragic Goth chicks just like me who are hopefully destined to shed their Goth chick persona, get with it, and get over it.

Sylvia Plath was the ultimate Goth chick.  Obsessed with death, obsessed with life only by how it defines death, and obsessed with finding new ways to die, over and over again, only to be revived a different way each time.  She did do it exceptionally well.  This time, I’m the resurrection.