Influence On Sylvia Plath's Life

Sylvia Plath, a poet and a novelist, was one of the most admired female writers of her time. She broke barriers and gave aspiring women writers someone to look up to. Plath was not afraid of taking risks and that fact became evident to others around her at a young age. At a very young age, Plath found her calling in writing and made it her life’s mission to ensure her voice in the world was heard. She published her first poem at the age of eight and continued to write from that moment until her death in 1963. In her writing, Plath uses many elements and themes to tell the stories of heroines living in an oppressive world. Most of her stories and poems were directly influenced by the chain of events that occurred in Plath’s own life. Plath’s father died from an …show more content…
Although she and her father were never close, it greatly affected her life. After the death of her father, Sylvia Plath’s life took a turn for the worse leading up to her own infamous suicide. Plath’s relationship with her father leads to her ongoing identity crisis which is later reflected in her poetry, especially her poem “Daddy.” From the time she was eight, Sylvia Plath’s life had begun to fill with chaos. At a young age, she lost her father due to a misdiagnosis of diabetes. As a result of this mistake, one of his lower extremities became infected with gangrene. Although she and her father were never really close, she developed an obsessive idolization of him. The idolization was so intense that her father, Otto Plath, basically controlled every aspect of her being even after his death. Egeland and other critics believe Sylvia Plath did not like the relationship that she had with her father (211). She grew up feeling like she could never exceed his expectations. Although she still had her mother, she did