Context Flashcards
1
Q
Childhood
A
- Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, spending much of her childhood at Nauset Beach.
- Plath frequently employs sea imagery in her poems, including ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Suicide off Egg Rock’. Some of her imagery presents the sea as calm and serene, while some depicts it as hostile and threatening.
2
Q
Depression and mental illness
A
- Plath suffered from depression and other forms of mental illness, including bipolar disorder.
- She attempted suicide several times before her successful suicide in 1963.
- Many of her poems, such as ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Tulips’, and ‘Suicide off Egg Rock’, exhibit her struggles with mental illness, which are often ironically romanticized.
- Plath was given electroshock therapy for depression and spent months in psychiatric care during her time in college.
3
Q
Father
A
- Plath’s father, Otto Plath, was a professor of biology, focusing on the study of bees.
- He died when Plath was eight years old as a result of complications from diabetes, linking to the motif of feet (he had a gangrenous toe)
- Otto Plath was German, and later moved to the US when he was 15 years old. There is speculation that he might have been a Nazi sympathizer. This is the reason for Plath’s frequent references to the Holocaust throughout poems such as ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’. Plath’s speakers also frequently characterize themselves as Jews. This can be seen in ‘Daddy’, where the speaker states that she ‘may well be a Jew’, echoing the oppressive effect of Plath’s father’s death on her. It is evident that her father’s death permeated all aspects of Plath’s life, including her romantic relationships, and is responsible, to a large extent, for her eventual suicide.
- Many of Plath’s poems, such as ‘Daddy’ and ‘The Colossus’ allude to the Electra Complex, the female equivalent of the Oedipus Complex, in which a girl experiences psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In fact, Plath has said herself that Daddy was about a girl with an Electra Complex.
4
Q
Marriage and children
A
- Sylvia Plath married the poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and had two children with him before they separated in 1962.
- Plath and Hughes had their first daughter Frieda in 1960, and the following year, Plath’s second pregnancy ended in miscarriage. In a letter to her therapist, Plath wrote that Hughes beat her two days before her miscarriage.
- They had a turbulent marriage that ended in separation. Hughes had an affair with Assia Wevill, whom he eventually left Sylvia for.
