�e college ggl mentally INSPIRED BY SYLVIA PLATH
eddd’s note SH AYANE LACE Y
This zine has been in development for a long time. The first piece you’ll find is my rant about the devaluation of Sylvia Plath, of her poetry, of her admirers. I wrote it a long time ago, in a very different stage of my life. I have admired Sylvia Plath’s work for a long time, but The Bell Jar and The Collected Journals took on a new meaning as I struggled through my first year at Cambridge. I vividly remember looking up passages from the time Plath spent at Newnham, and thinking: “I walked this street! I felt like this!” I found my voice, through Plath. In additon, I’ve hated that Woody Allen quote for a long time, so seeing a screencap of it float around after a Hellish Year at Cambridge ignited a fury. Before I knew it, I had set up a blog and an email for submissions. (Before promptly being swamped in university work - sorry! Please forgive me!) Now that I’ve graduated, I’ve managed to bring together all the artwork and piece of writing that were sent to me a few years ago. The thing that unites the content of this zine is that all of the pieces you’re about to see are by people who found a voice through Sylvia Plath’s life and work. I want to just say a big thank you to everyone who contributed to this zine. Please accept my eternal gratitude for responding to my call, and apologies for taking so long to put it together. I’d also like to thank my English teacher, Ms Bond, who taught me everything I know about literature between year nine to thirteen. I may not have ended up doing an English degree, but your lessons on Plath (and Austen and the Brontë sisters and so on) were a huge influence on me. They taught me that women’s voices matter, and importantly, that my voice matters too.
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contenn A BRIEF RANT 4 (TW: SUICIDE MENTION)
“OUT OF THE ASH” 6 AN INSIGHT INTO THE COLLEGE GIRL MENTALITY 8 (TW: SUICIDE MENTION)
SADS AT SIXTEEN 11 “MY SKIN, MY SKIN” 12 INSPIRATION 14 (TW: ABUSE)
PLATH’S PRESENTATION OF SEXISM AND MENTAL HEALTH IN THE BELL JAR 15 (TW: DEPRESSION, RAPE CULTURE, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, ABORTION, GASLIGHTING)
HEAD IN THE CLOUDS 19 ASK SYLVIA PLATH 24 (TW: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, SEXUAL ASSAULT)
LITERARY GODMOTHER 26 (TW: SUICIDE MENTION)
IDENTIFYING WITH SYLVIA PLATH 29 (TW: DEPRESSION)
THE ARCHETYPAL PLATH READER 33 (TW: DEPRESSION, SUICIDE MENTION)
ISOLATION 36 SYLVIA 37 (TW: SUICIDE MENTION)
CREDITS 39
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a ief
SHAYANE Every now and then, a screencap from Annie Hall appears on my Tumblr dashboard where Woody Allen’s character describes Sylvia Plath as the “interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality”. First of all, fuck Woody Allen. To briefly mimic him: the well-known creep whose abusive behaviour is defended by the pretentious college boy mentality. To be honest, I don’t give a damn what Woody Allen, or really any man, think about Sylvia Plath. Or what they think about teenage girls admiring her. The authors and poets admired by teenage girls are mocked, ridiculed, discredited. The idols of dreary teenage boys (Salinger, Kerouac, etc.), weirdly enough, are not treated in the same manner by highbrow, serious figures. I wonder why that’s the case. Oh wait, we already all know why. Secondly, what exactly is this “college girl mentality” that misunderstands Plath’s work? Oh right, it’s basically the fact that a lot of teenage girls relate to Sylvia Plath and engage with her work. It’s reductive to both teenage girls as thinkers and Plath as a poet to reduce her entire legacy to her suicide. It glosses over the fact that a lot of the most evocative and powerful writing by Plath was influenced by the patriarchal society she lived in.
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f rant
E LA C E Y For instance, Buddy Willard in The Bell Jar is a figure that constantly belittles Esther Greenwood, trivializing her feelings, her desires, and her work. As a teenage girl, I definitely had a Buddy Willard in my life. (To be honest, I’m sure we all know a Buddy.) By saying that girls are “romanticizing” Plath (and implying her suicide is the only reason girls are interested in her work) is regurgitating the same idea that what women think and feel is unimportant and insignificant. When I first read her work, I feel understood in many ways. 50 years after her death, her writing speaks to the issues girls still deal with: misogynistic attitudes that constantly want to tear them down, issues with mental illness, trying to discover their identities and work out which path they want to take. I can identify with a lot of Plath’s writing, especially as I attended a women’s college in Cambridge, struggling with my mental health. However, as a young middle-eastern woman, I’m very aware that the women who are (sometimes) allowed to hang in the boys’ club of “literary greats” remain overwhelmingly white and middle-class. While I might be out of my teens now, I will always remain a staunch defender of Plath, of teenage girls, and their right to be inspired by Plath.
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MA GGIE BRIDGE
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an intoiiigg the college girl mentality CAR LA I became a college girl myself last fall when I enrolled to study English language and literature. Having been an enthusiastic reader all my life, I went to my classes with an excitement that soon began to plummet and became replaced by disappointment as the same names of (male) literary geniuses kept being repeated over and over again. In one class called “The Twentieth Century and Beyond” we covered twenty-four different authors, of whom only five were women. And no one seemed to mind. Hence I was very excited when the semester after I got to take a class called “Modern Women Poets”. The professor introduced us to lots of brilliant writers that otherwise certainly would have been side-lined for the sake of keeping another Keats or Eliot on the schedule. Will anyone be surprised if I say that the professor was a woman herself, and only one male student attended the class? Representation, as has been proven again and again, matters. And for a young woman aspiring to be a writer, this disinterest in female voices is horribly disheartening. A class about male modern writers would have just been called “Modern Poets”, after all. At the age of thirteen, I started delving into the Great Classics of literature, particularly American. I soaked up Salinger and Hemingway and all their literary buddies like there was no tomorrow, and I had never any difficulties identifying with their male protagonists; it never even occurred to me to question why my literary heroes only ever explored the world from the male perspective. Gender
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just wasn’t an issue to me. Holden Caulfield was just as fed up with all the phonies around him as I was at fifteen, why would it matter to me that he was a boy? Sylvia Plath was the first woman writer that hit home with me like her male colleagues did. Before reading her, I simply had not known that there were women who wrote in the “profound grown up” fashion I so admired, so I’d subconsciously written them all off as the “chick lit” I knew about and didn’t care for. (Where that left me, a teen girl dreaming of spending my adult life typing up novels and short story collections while winning esteemed literary prizes every other weekend, in retrospect I’m not quite sure. I probably thought of myself as “not like other girls”.) The Bell Jar was the first book whose protagonist was not only similar to me in regards of hopes, dreams and aspirations, and the struggle to make sense of the world, but the main character also shared my gender. Reading the novel slowly helped open my eyes towards the injustice that currently still exists. I began to realise that there were more complicated reasons for the lack of female writers than “women just aren’t any good at it”. And, ultimately, Sylvia Plath’s success as a poet in a time where there was not only more, but also more blatant sexism, continues to give me hope for the women writers yet to come. There is this paragraph in one of her journals that has become one of my favourite quotes over the years: “I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost … But won’t. I am tired of mouthing other people. I want someone to mouth me.” Firstly, the sentiment she expresses is all too familiar to me. Secondly, I love the irony of quoting just these sentences. I like to think she would have liked that. And most importantly, I think it shows the amazing quality of hers to un-
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ashamedly speak her mind and not hide her light under a bushel - something that women are discouraged from doing from a very young age. Sylvia Plath’s strength of character is something that I deeply admire, and one of the reasons she’s become my personal role model. Now to that Woody Allen quote I’ve always hated so much: it’s a terrible injustice to her work and to her as a person that Sylvia Plath’s writing often is reduced to her “tragic suicide story”. But come on, who is responsible for that? The “college girls” who read her poems and feel understood, inspired, and encouraged by them? Or is it the numerous literary critics who for some reason feel more comfortable commenting on her personal life rather than on her work? Even though she lived in a time where all the cards were stacked against her, and she struggled with mental illness all her life, Sylvia Plath stayed true to herself and to her passion for writing. This is why, in my opinion, she is first and foremost one thing: A literary heroine.
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C A IT LIN HA ZELL
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“my skin,
E MM
My skin, my skin my glowing skin Tries it’s best to keep the monster in My rib’s tight grasp keeps the devil at bay The body that detains it all The fire and music of the eager cavalry The war has begun, what fun To win, first we must break in Break the skins defence O what a glorious fight The fire will not yield The fire is savage and feasts On my traitor blood I feel the devil in my chest How close to the beat it dwells That calmness chokes me too That devil, o my friend Slides up to my lips He likes it there, likes the air
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my skin”
MA
He projects his poison out and Leaves me naked and Cold and alone And you sit there on that chair With a glare and a stare What are you writing? Prescribe me a pill and ask Invasive questions about my skin I don’t wish to look at the battle ground Rotting flesh, flaking bones That embalms me, decomposing Egypt, are you dying too? Again I choke and the skins wins I sit like a Sally, composed? Waiting for the spark again
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iipppion AMY E LIZ ABE TH BLU NDELL
I found you through tumblr, and I thought maybe you might be interested in my opinion. Sylvia Plath is a large part of my life, because she seems to understand me. The Bell Jar is a novel that I relate to more than any other order of words ever written that I have read. The immense diversity of feelings portrayed throughout the novel made me feel as though I am not alone, and that I can be understood by someone, even if only by reading their work. The Bell Jar inspired me to call myself a feminist, to embrace my sexuality and my purpose in life. It showed me how little has changed since Plath wrote it, and how much needs to be changed. It is a timeless novel, one which has inspired many, including myself. Personally, it has helped me reasses my life. I was stuck in an abusive relationship, which I have since ended and moved on from. While this isn’t solely because of Plath’s novel, it isn’t untouched by it. I am currently starting off as a writer, convinced that if words printed on paper could affect me in such a way, and change my perspective, then maybe I could try and do the same. I know I will never be as good, but I can try. Reading The Bell Jar was an amazing decision of mine.
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in the bell jar:
pll’s enttion of sexxm and mental heaah R OSALIE WE LLS
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is an incredible book. One reason is because it masterfully shows how the protagonist’s experience of sexism contributes to her mental breakdown. There are several kinds of normalized sexism she experiences in the chapters before her mental collapse, which I will illustrate with my own personal, 21st century examples, and explain how they tie into women’s mental health. The most obvious sexism Esther faces is violent - the kind that Susan Brownmiller terms ‘rape culture’. One of the most chilling lines of dialogue in the novel comes from Esther’s friend Doreen, who requests Esther to ”Stick around, will you? I wouldn’t have a chance if he tried anything funny. Did you see that muscle?” Esther herself experiences this abuse at the hands of Marco, a ‘woman hater’, who rants at her, calling her a ‘slut’ and gripping her arm so tightly he leaves bruises. Aggression from men has by no means disappeared. When I rejected a boy’s advances at a house party last year, his response was to literally pick me up, so I was physically forced to listen to his attempts to convince me of my mistake.
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So why is this aggression towards woman damaging for our mental health? Well, there’s the obvious issue of trauma. Another relevant condition is agoraphobia. For women, outside is not a safe realm - in particular due to the verbal violence that they might encounter. This summer I was having a blue day so left the house to buy some Ben & Jerry’s to cheer myself up. I got honked twice in my 10-minute walk, with one driver yelling at me to ‘bend over’. I really wished I had stayed inside. A poignant form of sexism in The Bell Jar is Esther’s fear that her future is restricted because of her gender. When it comes to marriage, she imagines a ‘dreary and wasted life’ in which she will ‘cook and clean and wash’ whilst her husband works. It is not just Esther that believes this is her fate - her boyfriend of sorts, Buddy Willard, informs her that ‘after (she) had children… (she) wouldn’t want to write poems anymore’. Plath’s depiction of marriage reminded me of my senior school’s yearbook, in which one of the most popular answers to ‘where do you see yourself in 10 years time?’ was ‘married and with children.’ I would never argue that being married and having children is an inherently oppressive choice. I for one love the idea of being a mother. However when this lifestyle is mutually exclusive with a career, or being a creative person, as it is for Esther, it is obviously objectionable. Living a life in expectation of an entirely domestic future is damaging for countless reasons. One of these is that, as a teacher use to say to me, ‘regret is the most corrosive emotion’. Feeling like you have wasted your potential is indescribably stifling. Secondly, the problem with this mentality is that living entirely for your family’s sake and happiness degrades your sense of self, your autonomy and worth.
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This brings me on to all the times in The Bell Jar when Esther’s autonomy is denied. Much of this is due to Buddy, constantly insisting that her opinions on topics like marriage will change. Plath includes a more sinister form of this, when Esther witnesses a woman in labour. The woman is in torturous pain, which Buddy explains she will soon forget. This is because of the medication she has taken- ‘it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent.’ This moment reminded me of the abortion battles that still take place across the UK - my big sister’s university halls of residence were constantly surrounded by anti-abortion campaigners. As many female thinkers have pointed out, by assuming that a foetus’ life takes precedence over a woman’s choice to remain childless, you are essentially giving the foetus more rights than a woman.The idea of a government (male majority, of course) voting on what rights I get over my own body is alarming. The final form of sexism I want to discuss is common in 1953 and 2014. Double standards - that is, holding women and men up to irrationally different standards of behaviour, frequently disadvantaging women. This is often moral, and more specifically often sexual. In The Bell Jar, Eric (‘a southerner from Yale’) lectures about how ‘disgusting’ it is that girls from Esther’s college can be seen ‘necking madly’. His rant does not once mention the boys that were presumably involved in this activity. He then goes on to tell Esther about ‘losing his virginity’ in a “whorehouse”. So, although he thinks the girls he has witnessed are deplorable for kissing boys, his own sexual activity warrants no guilt whatsoever. The effect of this double standard is mentally exhausting - you are angry that boys are let off the hook for everything sexual, because boys will be boys, and
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you are terrified that people will find out that you have had sex- and enjoyed it. How are girls meant to develop a healthy attitude to sex when the messages they receive and internalize towards it are so contradictory? Esther, who thinks sex is such an important event in your life that she divides people in the world into those who have had sex and those who haven’t, has clearly been effected for the worse by these attitudes. My last reason for believing Esther’s depression is linked to sexism is that facing injustice is inherently exhausting. Gas lighting - when someone is persuaded that their suffering is somehow not real, fabricated by them, simply a result of playing the victim card - is even more exhausting. And this is what happens to Esther for those first 10 chapters of The Bell Jar- she faces instance after instance of sexual discrimination and oppression, without any coherent understanding of what she is experiencing. I believe the solution to this problem- the problem that makes women like Esther ‘so tired’- is becoming aware. Piecing together your experiences of gender based issues until you have some coherent understanding of what is wrong with society, and how you can challenge and deviate from its pressures. This is why reading books like The Bell Jar, books with female protagonists, and books by female authors is important. This is why reading about feminism, and engaging in Internet feminism, is so important. Don’t listen to anyone that says it isn’t achieving anything of substance. If you are a woman in need of self-esteem and peace of mind, the place to start is with feminism. It may not have solved all of Esther’s problems, but it would have helped her.
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head in e clouu ALICE R OOK E
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�k sylv
C OLLEEN F
I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night. “What does it mean?” A tall boy with short, curly hair motions towards the patch on my backpack. Dragging behind him are a gaggle of boys who mock-jog to keep up with Tall Boy’s pace. I suppress a sigh. I’m creeping towards the library to escape the chaos of the lunchroom. It’s a foggy afternoon, and my head feels foggy, too. I don’t want to answer. But I do. “It’s about walking outside at night, and being afraid of being stalked or raped or murdered. And experiencing that fear daily and wishing that things were different. Get it?” The boys glance at each other and shrug, hesitantly. They don’t get it. I pick up my stride. They catch up to me. Tall Boy leans over. “But what does it mean?” I slow down. I play with the buckles on my backpack. I smooth the frayed straps. I realize that outside of subjective experience, Sylvia Plath’s words are alien. To the majority of the students in my high school, she is a distant star in a faraway galaxy, nowhere to be found in the universe of Shakespeare and Golding and Orwell. When I discovered Plath three years ago, I leapt over the invisible fence that separated male fantasies of the female experience from female reality. I saw myself reflected in her work, and her writings became a mirror I looked at
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via pll
FL A N A G A N
to quell my own fears and anxieties. I declared myself a feminist after listening to a recording of The Applicant. I swallowed her poetry like I swallowed tablets of Klonopin. I indulged in The Bell Jar in homeroom and on the bleachers in gym class, facing my own insecurities and uncertainties through the book’s clever metaphors. And in empty playgrounds, in between hugs and kisses, I whispered Plath’s poems to my then-girlfriend: “I think I made you up inside my head…” Although I no longer need to use Plath as a mirror, her longing for freedom is fastened to my backpack because that secret fear is still there. Enforced by a culture where violence against women is expected and encouraged, the fear of being assaulted burrows deeply into my psyche and refuses to leave. And while I cannot speak for all women, I know that many of the girls and women in my life live with this fear and anxiety daily. Sometimes I feel comforted knowing that someone as powerfully influential as Sylvia Plath has felt this same gnawing fear, but at the same time, I almost feel hopeless, knowing that not much has changed over these past few decades. As I study the boys in front of me, I wonder if they’ll ever take off the goggles that perpetuate this equality fantasy. I wonder if they’ll ever take a look at female reality. I look at Tall Boy, and I think of his question. “But what does it mean?” It’s a foggy afternoon. My head still feels foggy. I open the doors to the library, and answer. “Ask Sylvia Plath.”
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sylvia plath as a
lllly godmooo E LIZABE TH Whenever I talk about Sylvia Plath, I call her Sylvia. This first name familiarity might be one of the reasons that people find it so easy to dismiss the ‘college girl mentality’ interpretation of Sylvia. When I act like a long dead poet is someone I know personally, how could I possibly understand her work? I am too emotional to understand those emotions from a step-back, clear view point. This is not the way academics should see literature. I read her work from a place that’s too connected, too emotional. Teenage girls are often thought of as rabid fans who scream and cry and can’t control themselves around their idols. Think Beatlemania. Think Directioners. Think of a thousand things teenage girls care about, and think of all the ways that is dismissed and belittled, and think of how wonderful it is that so many teenage girls have found a writer who writes about that emotion in her prose, but controls it in her poetry, and shares it all in her journals. The intense emotion of this imagined Teen Girl Reader gives Sylvia’s work a kind of power. The emotion intensifies her work and deepens the connection between writer and reader. My love of her work isn’t based around some morbid idealisation of a tragic poetess. It’s a genuine appreciation of good writing, and it’s a connection with a person I think I would have liked to know. And despite what some people seem to think, for me, understanding Sylvia Plath isn’t glamorising or understanding
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suicide. It is understanding ambition, and insecurities. It is understanding falling in love with men who destroy your earliest works, and it is understanding flirting too. It is understanding fucking up and rising again, Lady Lazarus-like. I’m not sure if I see Sylvia Plath as a friend, as such. Sometimes when I’m walking around Cambridge and realise that we walked the same paths, looked up at the same buildings, I think we could have been friend. Mostly though, she is something very different. She’s an encouragement and a warning sign combined. Someone in the rich literary history of the world who is there to show me “your feelings might feel like too much, but they’re valid writing” as opposed the thing I am often told, “never let your feelings get too much.” Maybe she is the literary godmother of girls across the globe? Girls who write seem drawn to her work. What comes first – our ambition or her writing? For me, I started writing short stories since I was 6, and haven’t stopped since, but Sylvia pushed it further. She showed me I could write about myself in tight considered poetry and deeply personal prose, and it could be literature and not just vanity. Sometimes, I think about publishing a book and dedicating it to Sylvia Plath. I think I owe it to her – for whatever you call it, fairy godmother or warning sign or something else altogether, she mattered to me. Without her I wouldn’t write the way I do today. I don’t think I could live the way I do today without her writing and her life. When I began to read her early journals, I was struck by how cheerful she was. How much she sounded like a teenage girl. How much she sounded like me. There was a joy for life in there, and I feel that in myself now, and I want to keep it alive. That feeling is present whenever I read about the lives of many other women
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writers, but it’s strongest with Sylvia. Life was beautiful and terrible for her, and she still found opportunities. And now there are so many more opportunities for me, and I feel like I owe it to a rich history of women writers to make the most of them. It’s almost like I don’t want her suffering, her struggle, to be for nothing. It’s probably kind of fucked up, but I don’t want to let all this despair and suicide continue for another cycle of young girls and young writers. I don’t really know what I’m talking about. Maybe this is why critics and professors and literary academics can’t let themselves get too attached to a book or an author. I have too much to say and my words are tripping over themselves and it’s like trying to explain why that girl a few years older than you at school seems so important to you. I can’t explain it. All I know is that she matters to me.
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MOR IAM OR E K AN
identifying wwh sylvia pll
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I discovered Sylvia Plath in my school library when I was 14 years old. I’d seen enough reading lists including ‘The Bell Jar’ to know Plath’s name and story by that point, so it wasn’t a particularly special moment of discovery. I checked her novel out of the library nonetheless; might as well knock another book off my list I figured. I do not remember how long it took me to finish ‘The Bell Jar’ (and I suppose that isn’t too important) but I do remember how quickly I engaged with her novel, and most importantly with the thoughts and emotions Plath was describing. I think what struck me most about ‘The Bell Jar’, and later on, other pieces of Plath’s poetry was how much and how quickly I related to it. Despite the fact that Plath was disguising herself as Esther Greenwood – a young woman at the start of working life and college; I still very much saw myself - a 14 year old at the time – successfully being depicted through the character, and her words. I read ‘The Bell Jar’ when I was first beginning to deal with depression, and I found a sense comfort in the words of Plath. Her depiction on how difficult it was to be happy, despite having and living through an opportunity of a lifetime, struck familiarly with myself – how despite the good life I lived and always had, I couldn’t find any joy. That with a throw of opportunities surrounding me and nothing to feel but excitement – I felt horribly frightened of life and its demands, and couldn’t understand why none of it appealed to me. At 14 and not understanding my depression, Plath wrote down all the words I couldn’t. I felt understood through her writings, and there is no doubt that other girls did and do feel the same. Her work and her writings transcend time and age in my opinion – and still continue to do so, which is why I think so many women engage with her. When I think of other female writings who have suffered through mental illness much like Sylvia Plath – Susanna Kaysen with ‘Girl,
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Interrupted’, or Elizabeth Wurtzel’s ‘Prozac Nation’ are the first to come to mind – it is not hard to see the similarities of Plath’s work – the same similar depictions of angst and misery; and I can’t help but feel like these women, much like many others, probably held a copy of ‘The Bell Jar’ or any one of Plath’s poem and also found solace and recognition within them. Simply put, whether a 14 year old girl or a 21 year old writer, Sylvia Plath has managed to include all of us, has managed to describe feelings in such a way that every woman can identify with her. Which is what I feel makes Sylvia Plath far more significant than other successful writers who have tackled the same issues; it is how she describes these things. It is one thing to sympathise with another, but when each sentence and stanza is riddle with the same overwhelming helplessness, guilt and misery that you yourself feel, it is entirely different and far more remarkable. This is also why I feel women of different races can feel the same sense of understanding and comfort within Sylvia Plath’s work. It is hard to find a writer or an artist whose work is relatable to all kinds of people; and while I don’t think this is necessarily their fault – you write about what you know and how things affect you and white women for example, will struggle with issues women of colour cannot identify with (and vice versa) but there will still always be that sense of exclusion. It took me a long time to identify with feminism simply because the only feminism I’d ever been exposed to didn’t include the same issues and struggles I as a woman of colour had. But I’ve never felt that there were certain parts to Plath stories and poems, or her opinions on feminism that I couldn’t relate to despite being a woman of colour and Plath being a white woman; and I think that just one more thing that makes Plath even more remarkable. Her feelings
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and depictions of struggling as a woman in a manmade world, as well as her trouble with mental illness can be stretched to include all women because all women struggle with these things; and Plath expresses it all in such a way that there is no exclusion. Ultimately, Plath has given me a place within her novels and books of poetry to feel understood and accepted. That despite the loneliness my mental illness makes me feel, there was Sylvia Plath and other women who struggle the same and feel the same anger and misery I do. And that being a woman should never hold me back from doing what I please. I am, I am I am.
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�e chetypal pll readd AN N A
I was fifteen the first time I read The Bell Jar; I was already aware I was a cliché. I had a brief goth phase, wearing black clothes and heavy kohl applied with a blunt pencil. I slouched around in the background, wearing a black night-dress layered over a pair of faded black jeans, while two girls dug through a bargain bin of clothing and sniggered at me. “Grunge is so over,” they said pointedly as they pulled out a pair of imitation converses. Once they had gone I pulled out the shoes myself and bought them. (Grunge inevitably came back into fashion.) I scribbled poetry in between classes, transferring the final versions with neat handwriting in a book that incongruously had a cover of Tweetie Pie talking on a large cell phone. And I had struggled with depression and thoughts of suicide for much of my life. I didn’t know it then but I was just poised to plunge into the worst episode of my life. In other words I was sensitive, introverted, bookish, literarily-inclined and neurotic: the archetypal teenage reader of Sylvia Plath. Teenage girl reader of Sylvia Plath of course. I think teenage girls know what people think of them. They may not be able to
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couch it in perfect feminist terms or even words at all. It may just be felt as a sense of unease and insecurity, but the knowledge that they are being invalidated is there. The stereotypes of what it means to be a teenage girl followed me everywhere in my mind. As I laboured over my poetry I simultaneously thought that what I was writing was inherently pretentious or clichéd, unworthy of attention even from my own self. When I experienced depression and especially when I later began to injure myself, words like ‘melodramatic’ and ‘attention seeking’ kept coming to mind. In other words, I was living out what psychologists Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan describe of teenage girls in their study Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development as “a loss of voice, a struggle to authorize or take seriously their own experience.” This was only reinforced by the culture around me, where the distress of teenage girls seemed to be regarded as funny. When my brother cracked a joke about ‘emo’ teenage girls cutting themselves, I had to turn away and swallow past the lump in my throat. In this context what The Bell Jar gave me was a language for my experience. My understanding of mental illness at that time was shaped by Very Serious (yet clinical and flat) awareness raising campaigns or portrayals full of drama and high emotion. None of them captured how I felt. By contrast Plath gave me words that fit the blank numbness of depression. Drawing on the way in which girl’s emotions and creativity are dismissed, the
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main character Esther is told by her boyfriend Buddy that a poem is merely a piece of dust. This is a rebuke both to Esther’s interest in poetry and to her own writing, especially in comparison to Buddy’s future career as a doctor. Not able to respond at the time, Esther imagines how she would answer in the future: “‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’ And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.” I did remember the words in The Bell Jar and in Plath’s poetry and I repeated some of them enough that they became a part of me, a part I could access when the world didn’t make sense. Through these words I found a way to take my experience seriously.
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ELLEN W ELSH
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sylvia
C H A R LOTTE IMLAH
For as long as I can remember being interested in studying English, I have always been a fan of Sylvia Plath’s writing. I first read The Bell Jar on a windy seaside holiday in Cornwall when I was sixteen and it haunted me for months afterwards. I had never read anything like it before, so raw and terrifying in all of its honesty. Something which, although completely different to my experience, chimed so perfectly with my own thoughts I felt as if she had cracked open my mind and shone a light inside to take notes. I have kept her work with me all the way through my English studies, reading her poetry in class and writing about Esther Greenwood for my A Level coursework. I bought a pretty, hardback edition of Ariel and folded down the pages of the poems that resonated most. For my first year studying literature at university, I wrote about three of her poems for two separate essays, getting alright but fairly average marks. That first term was tough for me, both academically and mentally, and so I read her journals for the first time in an anxious library haze, tracing the handwritten lines and trying not to cry in the silent section. I also confronted some of the more unsettling aspects of her work, both writing and talking about her misappropriation of the Holocaust in Daddy, which was difficult but (for a woman like me with Jewish ancestry) very cathartic and necessary. We had a lecture in my second term where a lecturer everyone but me dislikes read The Moon and the Yew Tree aloud in a converted church and I felt as if my soul was being laid bare. That line about the gravestones has always made me feel exposed. Her work saved me. In my time on this course I have met girls who know her words by heart and who wear her quotes on necklaces and in ink on their arms.
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Finding people who feel the same way as I do about her beautiful yet brief literary output made me feel safer here. One of my favourite memories of my time here was being drunk in a dingy night club toilet talking about Plath, five girls sharing heartfelt words about her impact on our lives. My friend started to quote Lady Lazarus and we all joined in to scream “AND EAT MEN LIKE AIR!” with our arms held aloft. At high school there were boys in my class who argued her poor mental health and the fact she committed suicide meant that we should disregard her work completely. They didn’t understand her struggles, and what’s more they didn’t want to. They laughed as I and other girls in my class defended her words and her life, our faces growing ever redder and our voices more and more choked. The next week, my brilliant teacher made a powerpoint presentation of famous and talented people who had killed themselves in defence of Plath, but my throat still felt tight. Studying here has been different though. Here, I have found a shared respect and love for Sylvia Plath, not just for her work but for what she has done for every one of us. I am coming into my final year as an English Literature undergraduate and she is still as important to me as ever; I have never felt more accepted than when I am amongst her words. My first year at university was difficult and it still sometimes is. Being here can be stifling, isolating and full of disappointment – emotions which The Bell Jar is dizzy with too. It isn’t simply comfort that I find in Plath but the feeling that I am no longer alone, and finding a group of girls here who also live inside her words has helped me so much. I am aware now that, as it can so often feel, I am not the only person who identifies so intensely and desperately with her explorations of mental illness. Sylvia Plath’s writing is so important to college girls, to girls and women in general, because it makes us feel validated and real and, above all, less lonely.
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�edds THANK YOU AGAIN:
MAGGIE BRIDGE / CARLA / CAITLIN HAZELL / EMMA AMY ELIZABETH BLUNDELL / ROSALIE WELLS / ALICE ROOKE COLLEEN FLANAGAN / ELIZABETH / MORIAM OREKAN ANNA / ELLEN WELSH / CHARLOTTE IMLAH
ALL SYLVIA PLATH QUOTES BELONG TO SYLIVA PLATH (OBVIOUSLY)
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