1963 was a particularly important year for the American confessional poetry movement because one of its main proponents, Sylvia Plath, committed suicide by suicide. carbon monoxide poisoning, sticking his head inside the oven and leaving behind a collection of verses that would later win the Pulitzer Prize. That same year, another Pulitzer Prize winner, Katherine Anne Porter, admitted in an interview: “I think I only put about ten percent of my energy into writing. The other ninety percent was "keeping my head above water," suggesting a link between creativity and mental illness, a phenomenon that psychologist James Kaufman has dubbed "the Sylvia Plath effect." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay But what I intend to explore in my essay is whether Sylvia Plath's suicide had less to do with her alleged mental instability and more to do with social construction. of his time, which slyly espoused, among other things, the repression of women and their conformity to a preconceived template according to conservative Victorian standards gleaned from his poetry and other works, as well as biographical details. Plath's youthful poetry before 1956 established her as a writer of developing talent, with a penchant for surreal imagery, an adherence to the usual rules of rhyme and meter, and a morbid obsession with themes of death . Among the sonnets and villanelles dedicated to abandoned lovers, she also writes lines such as "Death comes in a casual steel car" and "Time is a great machine with iron bars" and creatively explores a storyline apocalyptic. Unlike Emily Dickinson, whose attitude toward death was rather inconsistent and varied from poem to poem, for Sylvia Plath, death was the ultimate freedom from the deadly game of conformity, the "gift "birthday" ideal that she desperately wanted, as a last resort and as a solution. alternative to mental fulfillment and happiness. Plath's prolonged exploration of morbid themes thus highlights her confessional tendency, as well as society's inability to recognize the existential problems confronting the gifted adolescent. However, Sylvia Plath was neither alone in her depression nor her condition unique in literary tradition. Confessional poet and friend of Plath, Anne Sexton, whose poetry openly dealt with similar issues, also committed suicide eleven years later by locking herself in the garage and gassing herself to death. Before Plath in 1931, another lyric poet, Sara Teasdale, overdosed on sleeping pills following a divorce from her husband and a series of financial problems. With Virginia Woolf, Plath seemed to have found a special connection, writing in her diary that she felt her life "connected to her, in some way" and adding "But her suicide, I felt to reproduce it in that dark summer of 1953. Only I couldn't drown. I guess I'll always be too vulnerable, slightly paranoid. Three points can thus be highlighted: all the figures mentioned above were women, most wrote on feminist themes and were characterized by a fierce feeling of independence restricted by society. Seen from this perspective, it would seem that mental illness is not an individual phenomenon, but an inevitable collective symptom of a repressive and hypocritical society. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. fiction." Wecan demonstrate that Plath, who had an otherwise enthusiastic and outgoing personality, was threatened by a lack of freedom that she considered her natural right. Like Nora from Ibsen's A Doll's House who physically left her marriage to claim her own life and identity, Plath may have felt a similar need, but was forced to compromise for the sake of her family and society. Her playful and independent side is perhaps best demonstrated in the poem “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” where she writes “the leash of my gaze/Dangles the puppet people/Who, ignorant of how they diminish,/Laugh, embrace, get drunk,/ Don’t guess if I choose to blink/They die,” thus emphasizing his need to control and assert himself. Yet her growing helplessness and inability to integrate into a society that valued the ideals she hated prompted her to confuse independence with death, as shown in the poem "I Am Vertical" where she writes " And I will be useful when I finally go to bed: Then the trees can touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me" and concedes that she is neither "spectacularly painted" nor "the beauty of a garden bed,” which brings us to the central dilemmas of Plath’s life: the need to conform to stereotypical notions of the housewife and motherhood. Advertisements and magazines of her time focused heavily on the need to be a "good" housewife, which included being skilled in the arts of cooking and weaving and being submissive to the will of the husband. . In other words, a woman must spend her childhood and adolescence preparing a portfolio to show that she is the best eligible candidate for marriage and spend the rest of her life living up to those expectations and sacrificing all of her own dreams and aspirations for someone else. . Naturally, female writers had no place in such a social order and Plath parodies this trope in her poem "The Petitioner" where a would-be wife is deprived of her sex and her skills are advertised as follows: "She is impervious, unbreakable, proof/Against fire and bombs through the roof./Believe me, they'll bury you in it. Similarly, in "A Birthday Present", the thought of death invades her mind when she is involved in household activities such as cooking and following "rules, rules and rules" and she openly states: " I don't want much of a present, anyway. , this year./After all, I'm only alive by accident. anyway” and talks about his insecurities as being “woefully inadequate”. In her list of things she couldn't do, she includes cooking, dancing, singing, shorthand, etc., all the prerequisites of an accomplished woman of her time. If on the one hand she wishes for "a happy home and children", she also cherishes the wish to be a "famous poet", "a brilliant teacher", an "extraordinary editor", a globetrotter and a life of “lovers with queer first names and offbeat careers”. Yet she concedes that choosing one option involves "losing everything else", thus emphasizing her desire both to conform to society and to live her own bohemian life on her own terms. In addition, a stint in Mademoiselle magazine exposed her to the "theater" world of glitz and glamor of New York which only disillusioned her and in "Les Mannequins de Munich", in reference to the artificial models in the windows stores, she comments "Perfection is terrible, she can't have children", thus emphasizing how a woman's identity is essentially defined by her abilities to procreate. Likewise, in "The Mirror", she evokes a woman's obsession with.