A Biography on the Life of Sylvia Plath Essay

America stands as the most prominent nation of liberty and freedom for all, yet some people still feel the reins of America’s oppressive past. Those include young African Americans and women, who feel that society places unequal expectations on them, simply based on their gender or race. Two young, American writers, Sylvia Plath and Langston Hughes especially feel this way through their works, Sylvia Plath at Seventeen and Theme for English B. Plath and Hughes employ tone, tone shift, and parallelism throughout their works to convey their message that young adults must stand up to demoralizing social expectations.

Majority of her poems dealt with depression, anxiety and death. Plath has dealt with many

It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the opposite of the “monsters” in their lives, are the exact replicas of these ugly men. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a perfect example of this unfortunate trend. In this poem, she speaks directly to her dead father and her husband who has been cheating on her, as the poem so indicates.

Sylvia Plath was a troubled writer to say the least, not only did she endure the loss of her father a young age but she later on “attempted suicide at her home and was hospitalized, where she underwent psychiatric treatment” for her depression (Dunn). Writing primarily as a poet, she only ever wrote a single novel, The Bell Jar. This fictional autobiography “[chronicles] the circumstances of her mental collapse and subsequent suicide attempt” but from the viewpoint of the fictional protagonist, Esther Greenwood, who suffers the same loss and challenges as Plath (Allen 890). Due to the novel’s strong resemblance to Plath’s own history it was published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath expresses the

Sylvia was born in Boston on 27th October 1932. She has grown up in a family environment which supports self-improvement and literal works. Sylvia’s father, Otto was a dominant presence in the house. He died when she was eight years old because of pulmonary embolism after an amputation surgery. After Otto’s death Aurelia worked too much to ensure a good living for her children. They moved from one place to another for many times. This situation caused an unstable family life for both children. Sylvia’s first published poem was published after her father’s death. She was a motivated and successful student at school. She earned a scholarship from Smith College in 1950 and continued to read

October 27th in 1932, Sylvia Plath was born, to parents Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober Plath. One of the

Rosalyn was born on July 19, 1921 into a wealthy family in New York City. Her mother, née Clara Zipper, came to America from Germany at the age of four. And her father, Simon Sussman was born in the city. She grew up in the town and had a normal childhood. Rosalyn always enjoyed reading and read many books on her free time. She attended school at Walton High school and excelled in math and science. She later went to Hunter college, an all-girls school in the city. She worked and lived in the city until she was older. After that she moved out of the city and attended a different college. The physics department at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana offered her a teaching assistantship in

In her poem, “Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia Plath uses dark imagery, disturbing diction, and allusions to shameful historical happenings to create a unique and morbid tone that reflects the necessity of life and death. Although the imagery and diction and allusions are all dark and dreary, it seems that the speaker’s attitude towards death is positive. The speaker longs for death, and despises the fact the she is continually raised up out of it.

To make matters worse, when she arrived home a letter awaited her saying that she had been rejected from Frank O'Connor's short story class. She was almost positive that she would get in and was deeply devastated when she received the rejection letter. Both the disappointment of New York and the rejection from the coveted writing class that she counted on started a deep spiral into clinical depression. Pressure was building up between her mom pushing her to return to her old self and her inability to sleep or read. Plath felt despondent. She even had an unsuccessful attempt at suicide by hiding herself away in the crawl space of her cellar and taking an overdose of sleeping pills. However, Plath was found and immediately institutionalized. Plath described this time as the blackest in her life saying in A Birthday Present “I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way” (Malmsheimer 531).

Flannery O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. She was an only child. Her father Edward F. O’Connor was a real estate agent, and her mother Regina Cline was a homemaker. When O’Connor was six, she became famous because the Pathe News filmed O’Connor with her trained chicken and showed the film around the country. When O’Connor was a teenager her father died of systemic lupus erythematosus. She attended the Peabody Laboratory School, graduating in 1942. She then entered Georgia State College for Women in an accelerated three year program, graduating in 1945 with a Social Sciences Degree. In 1946 she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first study journalism. As an adult she was a devoted roman catholic and after battleing lupus like

Sylvia Plath’s work is marked with her trademark style, one full of enigmatic analogies and ambiguous metaphors. Sadly though, the life of Sylvia Plath was indeed shorter than anyone expected. Nevertheless, in the thirty years Plath meandered through the world, she left an everlasting impact. Remembered as one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the twentieth century, Plath cultivated a literary community unlike any predecessor. Additionally, since a sizable portion of Plath’s work was read posthumously, her suicide brought the much needed attention to physiological illnesses. Unfortunately though, Sylvia Plath will never know the perennial impact she left from her distinguished works that have touched numerous lives.

Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts in 1932. She started writing poetry at a young age, and had her work published in some periodicals. Her father died in 1940 when she was only 8, and his

Sylvia Plath attended smith college in Massachusetts, editing The Smith Review, and aspiring for a writing career. During this time she had problems with her depression and attempted suicide. She moves onto Newnham college on a fulbright scholarship continuing the school paper. One of her major published works was The Bell Jar, which was inspired by events surrounding her depression in college. She tried to attempt suicide multiple times and much of her work was published after her death at the age of 30, including Ariel.

Sylvia Plath’s personal views on domesticity shine through in narrator Esther Greenwood, Esther’s lack of maternal instincts and her desire of freedom from a man’s possession are critical points when examining Esther’s choices. Within the novel there are several mentions of motherhood as well as Esther’s lack of material instincts. During the hospital scene, when Esther witness’s childbirth she is told by a male doctor before the birth

Wrapped in gaseous mystique, Sylvia Plath’s poetry has haunted enthusiastic readers since immediately after her death in February, 1963. Like her eyes, her words are sharp, apt tools which brand her message on the brains and hearts of her readers. With each reading, she initiates them forever into the shrouded, vestal clan of her own mind. How is the reader to interpret those singeing, singing words? Her work may be read as a lone monument, with no ties to the world she left behind. But in doing so, the reader merely grazes the surface of her rich poetics. Her poetry is largely autobiographical, particularly Ariel and The Bell Jar, and it is from this frame of mind that the reader interprets the work as a