Sylvia Plath's Life Inside The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath, known for her tragic life and suicide, is one of the most well-known poets of her time and today. Sylvia Plath, the first child of an Australian mother and a German father, was born in Boston on October 27, 1932. Her father was a famous scientist. He died when Sylvia was only 8 years old. Plath says, “I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still.” Sylvia Plath published her first poem at age eight. She entered and won many literary contests. She first sold a poem to The Christian Science Monitor and a short story to Seventeen magazine while still in high school.

After the death of her father, her mother started to work as a teacher to raise her two children when she started to suffer financial difficulties. Her mother was not only altruistic but also a perfectionist. She always wanted her daughter to do her best, and Sylvia did too. She completed her entire education by winning scholarships and earning good honors in all poetry competitions she participated in. She entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1951 and was a winner of the Mademoiselle magazine fiction contest in 1952. Plath achieved significant creative, intellectual, and social success at Smith, but she also suffered from depression, attempted suicide, and was hospitalized for mental reasons. She graduated with honors from Smith in 1955 and then moved on to Newnham College in Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright grant. After Sylvia Plath graduated from college, she decided to continue her life by writing poetry.

In 1956, she married the English poet Ted Hughes; they had two children. Ted was very important to Sylvia because she saw him as the male figure she had always lacked in her life.

But this relationship was not as good for Plath as she thought. She hissed herself, restricted in creativity. Thinking that she had met the love of her life and could recover, Plath turned into a woman raising children at home and waiting for her uninterested husband to come home. Great love has turned into great unhappiness. Because of Ted's unfaithfulness and his constant cheating on Sylvia, they split up in 1962.

(https://allpoetry.com/Mad-Girl's-Love-Song)

Sylvia Plath's works as a poet and her expansion of the style of confessional poetry led her to become a major part of American literature. The ways Plath highlighted the injustices of sex-based roles and psychiatric care make her important to all American history.

Her only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in London in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The book, which is deeply autobiographical and deals with the vulnerability of the human mind and revolution against the male-dominated culture, portrays the mental collapse and subsequent recovery of a young college girl and matches Plath's breakdown and hospitalization in 1953. Plath abandoned the limitations and norms that had bound most of her early writing during her final three years. She wrote quickly, generating poetry of raw self-revelation and confession. The tension, confusion, and doubt that plagued her were transformed into powerful and pathos-laden poetry borne on flashes of piercing humor.

After this period of activity, she committed suicide in 1963. She closed the doorways well so that her children would not be harmed, and she committed suicide by opening the kitchen and breathing gas. And when they found it, her head was in the oven.