Sylvia Plath: Why She Wrote

Sylvia Plath: Why She Wrote What She Wrote
What is literature? Literature is around us everyday: it is the basics like reading and writing in school. It is the way that we think. Literature is exploring and putting our new experiences into our own life. Why study literature? Literature is a way of finding yourself, often times at your most vulnerable: your youth. What value does it have? Literature a way to know more about what’s going on around you, and also what you think on the inside. Most authors find that the topic easiest to write about is what they know best: themselves. One author that is known for devoting her life to work is poet Sylvia Plath. Plath put everything she had into her work, especially on her darkest days: when her husband …show more content…
It was at Smith College that started to trigger an undeniable depression. Since Plath lived in the time period that she did, there was no medication to help with the symptoms of her mental disorder, later described as bipolar disorder (Poetry). When Plath was only a year in her college education, she swallowed several sleeping pills and hid under her porch with the desire to cease her life (Bio). Sylvia survived and was immediately checked into a hospital for six months and recovered with electro-shock therapy (which today is called Electroconvulsive Therapy, which uses electrodes to cause a minimal seizure and ultimately reduce symptoms of all different kinds of mental problems and disorders (Electroconvulsive)). This was what inspired her single novel published, titled The Bell Jar. After being hospitalized, she decided to return back to Smith College, then found out she could study at Cambridge University in England on scholarship. She took the chance and moved across the Atlantic Ocean. While at Cambridge, she fell in love with fellow poet Ted Hughes (Poetry). In the sixth month of 1956, they wed. They had two children together, Frieda and Nicholas. Shortly after the birth of their second child, Ted abandoned Sylvia and their children because of an affair he had with a woman named Assia Gutmann Wevill. During this time, her poetry began to flourish and would eventually be tied together to create a book of …show more content…
She was in an extremely dark and vulnerable place during this period of her already rollercoaster life. Her husband had an affair and she had cut off ties with her widowed mother because Sylvia was afraid she would become her, and not her own person. On this day, she decided to leave a note to call the doctor at 9 o’clock in the morning. She put her head in the oven and died