Sylvia Plath — “God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences …”
A compilation by Kevin Dayhoff February 7, 2024
Sylvia Plath tragically died by taking her own life at the age of 30, on February 11, 1963.
Plath was known to starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction that resonated with many. The Bell Jar, written under the pseudonym, Victoria Lucus, was not overwhelmingly well accepted when it was first released.
The Bell Jar was a manifestation of her mental crisis. The well-known “fig tree” quote illustrates the paralysis of indecision.
An except reads, “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.
“One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet...”
However, Charlotte Ahlin calls to our attention in a piece she wrote on March 19, 2018, “This Quote From 'The Bell Jar' Is Always Used Out-Of-Context & It Changes The Whole Meaning.” https://www.bustle.com/p/the-fig-tree-quote-in-the-bell-jar-is-always-used-out-of-context-it-actually-changes-the-entire-meaning-8509944
“Nearly every young person can relate to the fig tree: that horrible, suffocating feeling of indecision, the sense that every choice you make for the future means giving up on ten other choices. The knowledge that you can only move forward, and that if you choose the wrong "fig," the right fig might fall and rot before you get to it.
“There's nothing necessarily wrong with plucking this quote out of The Bell Jar — in many ways, it captures the crux of Esther's depression in a single paragraph. She feels inadequate, paralyzed by indecision, and unsure of what she wants. She's starving to death and yet unable to reach out and pluck a fig, any fig, from her tree. She can see future happiness, but doesn't know how to grasp it. She's numb to her own life. There's a reason that this quote resonates with so many people.
“But people rarely seem to quote the page after the fig tree.
“Esther has this disturbing vision while out on a date with Constantin, who's giving her a tour of the U.N. Being surrounded by all these accomplished, multilingual young people prompts Esther to start mentally listing all the things she's terrible at. She berates herself on her own flaws (she can't cook, she doesn't know shorthand, she's a bad dancer) until she spirals into the fig tree metaphor, sure that she will never live up to her promise as a gifted, scholarship kid.
“Then, however, Constantin takes her to a restaurant, and Esther has to sit down and eat. Then, there's this: ‘I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.’”
In college - in January 1955, Plath submitted her thesis “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels.”
In 1956, while on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge University, she married the British poet Ted Hughes after a whirlwind courtship. They were both ambitious, and hoped to become the leading poets of their generation. For Plath, it was a marriage mired with misfortune that rivals that of a Greek tragedy on steroids.
Interestingly enough, in the later years of her marriage, Hughes and Plath kept bees, the topic of many of her poems.
I always found it fascinating that in 1958 she worked, for a brief time, as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital.
Her novel, The Bell Jar, was published in London in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Strongly autobiographical, the book describes the mental breakdown and eventual recovery of a young college girl and parallels Plath's own breakdown and hospitalization in 1953.
After her death, many of us can identify with Al Alvaraz, who later wrote, according to an article in The Guardian, “"I failed her ... I was thirty years old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do…” At the time, Plath had been separated from Hughes for six months while he was having an affair with Assia Gutmann Wevill, who was pregnant with Hughes’ child at the time. In part, haunted by the death of Plath, Wevill took her own life on March 23, 1969.
Plath’s tombstone reads: “Even amidst fierce flames / the Golden Lotus can be planted.” These lines are from Chinese literature, Wu Cheng'en's Monkey: Journey to the West – although other folks attribute it to the Hindu text from “Bhagavad Gita.”
All this - according to some old, disheveled notes and files recently found in the bottom of a box of discarded poems and short stories that were compiled and assembled from multiple undocumented sources over many-many years. Out of an abundance of caution - no claim to original authorship is either claimed or implied. As a young writer, I was always fascinated with the idea of having the opportunity to have interviewed Sylvia Plath.
For additional context, read: “'I realised Sylvia knew about Assia's pregnancy - it might have offered a further explanation of her suicide' In a heart-breaking new twist in the story of the lives and deaths of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Sigmund recalls a moment of terrible realization” from The Guardian, April 22, 1999. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/apr/23/features11.g21
For a brief introduction to Sylvia Plath, be sure to watch a short “TED-ED” on YouTube, “Why should you read Sylvia Plath? - Iseult Gillespie.” Find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCWl8ZIgCHk
Find an interview with Sylvia Plath from 1962, on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2lMsVpRh5c And a great collection of pictures of Sylvia Plath Here: “Sylvia Plath reads November Graveyard:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ujeHnrT8A (About the graveyard in Heptonstall. in which she was buried in 1963.)
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