Sylvia Plath 1932-1963

Sylvia Plath is one writer I never wanted to read – partly because she seemed to have a “cult” following. My reluctance had, however, another motive: I don’t like to visit the lives or the works of women who’ve killed themselves before I could pull them back from the brink. 

I feel that way about Virginia Woolf and her suicide. Even about Alice James, the sister of her top-of-the-line brothers, William James the philosopher and Henry James the novelist. (Alice didn’t kill herself; only suppressed whatever intellectual and creative proclivities she may have had, being advised by the best experts of the day that her explorations of her creative side were the cause of her phobias.)

I’ve talked two women friends out of killing themselves, and a third from smoking dope. So I have some reason to believe that I can tell what’s going on when women decide that they’ve failed at life.

In the case of Sylvia Plath, it can be argued that her psychic vulnerability had a biochemical basis, so that her opinions (or mine) about how her life was going would have counted for little vis-à-vis the final outcome.

Against this, there is the finding (for which Bessel van der Kolk makes the case in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma) that the brain itself is chemically affected by traumatic events, and – by the same token – traumatized neural pathways in the brain can be rerouted and normalized when the sufferer is trained to practice new, harmonious habits of one sort or another. If van der Kolk is correct, then we are not necessarily the victims of our wounds – whether societal or biochemical in origin.

So I tend to believe that she could have been saved and spared for a life that might have been long enough to acquire its full and fair share of frustrations, tragedies and fulfillments. She could have lasted.

Having just begun to read the Plath journals, I can see that the cultural values she faced as a woman much resembled the prefeminist ones that I and my Barnard classmates would be navigating too, a few years later. For one example: a woman friend who graduated first in her class – winning all the academic honors one could get – after graduation learned touch typing and took her first job at a women’s magazine by the name of “Charm Magazine.” She was just bright enough to have surveyed the post-college territory and seen how the life of a woman had been mapped from edge to edge by the culture of that time.

“From the moment I was conceived,” Plath writes, “I was doomed … to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording – all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy.”

Of course, she romanticizes the envied freedom of men. Men don’t walk through the world weightless, fearless or unconstrained. The competition between men goes understated in Western societies but is fully as fierce as the male imagination can conceive. Frankly, taking everything into the bargain, I’d really rather be a woman … .

So what’s the lesson to be drawn here? Let me draw on my own experience here. At the time I was acquiring philosophic training – training to teach and write in my field – I was told explicitly that, if I wanted to get anywhere in that field I would have to “destroy [my] femininity.” 

That wasn’t said to me out of meanness. It was said because the professor who said it believed it to be true. So he was being honest with me. Which was, after all, in its way, respectful. What’s more, he was saying out loud what they all thought, both fellow students and my professors.

So why couldn’t I have just offered a refuting counter-argument? Well, perhaps I could have. But I sensed that this wasn’t about winning an argument. It wasn’t taking place on that level. It was about the matrix, the atmosphere, the surround of being a man or a woman at that time. What the culture denied – at that point in its unfolding – was that philosophy could be anything other than a masculine endeavor. 

Even then, there were, of course, distinguished women in philosophy. But they were, to my perception, self-masculinized. So the seeming exceptions only proved the larger rule. Philosophy was – had always been, could only be – a masculine activity. Could I have fought that rule? To fight it was all too possible. But it would have taken a more masculinized (or else culturally blinkered) woman than I was!

By degrees, by efforts – some of them quite costly and self-subverting – the culture would begin to change. I knew a number of the women who were in the vanguard of the women’s movement, bringing about important changes, legislative and attitudinal. And I also knew in some measure what it had cost them. To some degree, and in my own way, I too shared the over-simplifications and the semi-gnostic great leaps of “the movement.”

Most of us do our best … to live as truthfully and decently as we can. Even if we can’t sail smoothly and effortlessly over the places – steep and rough – in culture and history where we find ourselves, I think of the rhetorical question that long ago I heard a young Russian ask his compatriots, in a café on the Rue de Tournon:

“What is love?” he asked, and then answered his own question:

“To love –

is to suffer.”

Related Content: Women Enemies and Women Friends | Feminism without Contradictions | Micro-Metaphysics