A Psychoanalytic Study of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's rage at her abandoning husband and at her late beloved father was partly a displacement of anger toward her loving but smothering mother. Her schizoid pathology resulting from the symbiosis (along with her bipolarity) helped prompt her suicide. At the same time her rage at the men represented a struggle to prevent it. The focus of this paper is to explore in the context of her life how the style as well as the content of her last book, Ariel, made for one long suicide note-albeit a beautifully written work of art. In the most accessible of her poems, such as "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," and "Edge," her health overcomes her pathology. In others her pathology dominates. In Ariel Plath attempted and succeeded in turning herself into a tragic, mythic heroine, eventually drowning herself in a gas oven as she would have in the ocean-a key metaphor for her mother.