Death becomes 'Her': Woolf and Plath

Ah, but I’m doomed! As a matter of fact, I think that we all are. [. . .] For I agree with you that nothing is going to be achieved by us. Fragments—paragraphs—a page perhaps: but no more. . . . The human soul, it seems to me, orientates itself afresh every now and then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole, therefore. The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement. Still, it seems better to me to catch this glimpse.

Virginia Woolf's Letter to Gerald Brenan, Christmas Day, 1922.

The notion of leaving a "legacy" often weighs heavily on writers' minds. Many may wonder how they will be remembered in the years or decades to come, and that is if they are remembered at all. They may wonder how future generations will receive their works or whether their significance will endure. Yet, the idea of legacy carries an inherent risk: what if the image that survives is not the one the writer would have wanted? This raises important questions about how we remember writers: as creators of literature, or as figures whose personal stories become mythologized?

For Sylvia Plath, her life story has become intertwined with her poetry and novels. Her name is frequently tied to her suicide, and this focus often overshadows her literary brilliance. Of course, her novel The Bell Jar is semi-autobiographical, and it makes it difficult to separate her voice as an author from her personal pain. Yet the focus is always on her death; you might even find pictures of people ‘roleplaying’ her suicide when you google it. The "aestheticization" of her struggles takes over and becomes a ‘type of girl’ people feel connected with. It becomes part of a performative culture where it’s not even important if you read her work anymore, as long as you seem like a person who would. This phenomenon is also not limited to Plath. Writers like Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and even Emily Dickinson (maybe in a different way) face similar treatment, where their work becomes secondary to the narrative surrounding their lives. It's troubling when the depth of their writing is not the focus but a public fascination with their pain, almost a consumption, transforming them into a symbol of this, a symbol of that now on TikTok. 

Their struggle with mental health is also weaponized to discredit their talent. Society simply cannot accept women can possess talent in writing; instead, they insist that their struggles must somehow explain or justify their creative output.  This bias becomes even more obvious compared to how male writers are treated, being called ''geniuses'' no matter what.

The question is: Why does this happen? Because people find comfort in connecting with an artist's pain? Or is it more about society's tendency to sensationalize and simplify, especially women’s works?

Jessica Dunn, in her thesis, Unearthing Real Women: Reclaiming Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf from Their Suicide Narratives, writes:

When suicide overshadows the legacies of women such as Woolf and Plath and causes their words to become of secondary importance, female writers lose powerful models of women’s writing. We lose our literary foremothers. These attempts at explaining suicide, what I will call “suicide-as-victim narratives,” are often reductive and create a warped view of the person they revolve around. To stop at the knowledge of suicide leaves other more useful information unconsidered and creates a distorted image of these writers. While most writers are judged by the quality of their work, the act of suicide causes focus to move from their work to judging their life and work based on their deaths. The life of the writer, which can provide useful insight into the work, is reduced to its termination and given too much value.

She also gives an example from a photoshoot called 'Last Words' from Vice magazine, which involved seven female authors (Woolf and Plath being two of them) who had committed or attempted suicide. The picture of Plath included a model in a kitchen, kneeling in front of an open oven, while the picture of Woolf was a woman 'dressed in a typical Victorian lace dress standing shin deep in a muddy river, embracing a rock as she resolutely gazes just past the camera.' (Dunn 2016) For a photoshoot called 'Last Words', they hardly mentioned the works written by these women, their influence, their achievements, or even a brief biography. Their suicides are what they are now, who they are.

We need a nuanced understanding of female writers, like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, that transcends the tragic endings of their lives. We can acknowledge the complexities of their lives to understand them and their works, while not allowing their deaths to overshadow their artistic achievements and legacies. Woolf and Plath were groundbreaking literary figures. Sylvia Plath's poetry already had a positive reaction when she was alive; she was praised for her intense attention to detail. To suggest that people only read her work now because of the romanticization of her death is dismissive. Virginia Woolf was basically the Beyonce of her time, writing literary masterpieces such as Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own. These women deserve more than just pictures of models reenacting their deaths; they deserve to be remembered for their contributions to literature.