Once I read poetry by Sylvia Plath named Mirror where she speaks about how people treat a mirror differently. A mirror just shows you the truth but in return receives screams and tears. People hide their flaws and misconceptions under fainted lights and filters. They feel pretty for some time and then when the light appears they cry again. A mirror always shows the truth, the truth no one wants in their lives.
More than a skin, more of a human
Then I became interested in the life of the woman who wrote such madness on a paper. The madness that my heart always feels in those nights when I also scream at my mirror. I came across her book The Bell Jar and couldn’t stop from reading page after page. It spoke volumes to me, made me feel more of a woman. Never did I feel so belonged to someone in my entire life. I felt with Sylvia, the woman who had to live in a bell jar all through her life. She never says it is her in the book, she names herself as Esther. This is her semi-autobiographical novel.
Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman
I never like to admit but I began to know more about Sylvia because of her mental illness and suicide. This is a very brave topic to write about. It takes courage to not flow in emotions and get in with personal discontinuities. She writes To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. When you read Sylvia you feel she is sitting beside you. You feel her body moving beside you blowing air out of the lips which are reading out things about a tainted life.
Survive, but not live
There are strawberry fields and then there is sudden depression, such was her life. Most of the time she feels lost in the happiest places. She feels scared to laugh. She feels scared to love and this gets reflected in her poetry. A cauldron of repressed emotions, she feels but never shows. Her eyes see things which you never know are killing her from inside. She then goes to her pen and writes her heart down.
An indefatigable struggle in her life, first her father’s death then a failed marriage. She was scared and alone. A cheating lover can be the misery of a lifetime. She lived alone with her children, writing day and night to feed her family. The girl who won a scholarship from Cambridge was under confident and eventually wanted to take her life. She succeeded in the year 1963, it was February.
The alone and beloved
A beautiful couple who were living the American dream – Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. They loved like there was no tomorrow. The love they had is eminent from the poems in The Colossus, where she wrote about her role as a lover. Domestic violence, abuse, and cheating, she had to go through it all. Little did she know during her early years there was so much more to come. Sylvia lived alone, writing out to feed three souls.
Her poems are so rare and divine, born out of struggle and depression. They are the fruits of the sleepless nights, silent screams, and a lot of mental agonies. The conundrum of the purpose of life, the uncertain future made her think about taking her life many times until February of 1963 where she succeeded by sticking her head into the oven. A woman often seen living life and smiling in her pictures ended her life all alone. Therapy, electric shocks, and pills couldn’t save her. They couldn’t let her know there is a life beyond the suffering, there is still some hope.
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