Dying for Melodrama

Thirty years after her suicide, Sylvia Plath continues to seduce the adolescent psyche. But her fans are just as likely to romanticize her death as they are her poetry.

By Alissa Quart, published on November 01, 2003 - last reviewed on February 14, 2008

"I was having problems with cliques," Torn remembers. "Then I found The Bell Jar and read it five times." Before she read Plath in the late 1970s, Torn says she was a "wild child" sneaking out of her family's home at night to frequent clubs. "The Bell Jar gave me faith in sticking to my individuality—with its scars and bruises. Plath helped me have faith in what's really there."

But Plath's search for identity in life always morphs into an exploration of identity through suicide or death. She is not just a literary icon because of her rich, strange metaphors, or the emotional honesty of her work. "Unfortunately, Plath's appeal is because she killed herself, which is not a great legacy," says Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Plath, like many people with dramatic lives, suffered from severe depression. Teenagers may appreciate Plath because they are experiencing intense moods and emotions for the first time. They are also at the average age for the onset of depression. People keep writing books about Plath's long-suffering marriage, demonizing Ted Hughes. How many people actually read her poetry rather than read about her life?" Indeed, Zlabinger discourages zealous students of Plath from writing extended essays about the poet because "adolescent girls—boys are never drawn to her voluntarily—have trouble getting beyond the biographical elements and reading the poetry as art."

Plath's short life had the mark of melodrama. Her stormy marriage to the poet Ted Hughes was troubled by his emotional domination of her, and their bitter separation. Plath's suicide in February 1963, at age 30, occurred at the peak of her creativity, just after she'd completed the poems published posthumously as Ariel. Sixteen-year-old Plath fan Selbin understands the intrigue of such an exit. "If you die right after you do your great work, then you get to be even more idolized, like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe. I try not to buy into that."

As the writer Janet Malcolm noted in her meta-biography of Plath, The Silent Woman, "She will never reach the age when the tumults of young adulthood can be looked back upon with rueful sympathy and without anger and vengefulness." And in a sense Plath appeals to teenagers because she is forever young: trapped in the heady, furious emotions of the quasi-adult. Teens have a tendency to idealize states of being. They do so because they have not yet developed that mature, plodding faith that their momentary feelings of love or desire for self-annihilation will soon stabilize into feelings that are both cheerier and more mundane.

In fact, Plath's paradoxical knack for setting her morbid preoccupations into stanzas that burst with life may be what makes her so appealing to a certain stripe of teenager. A new theory of youth suicide claims that the desire to kill oneself and the desire to live more intensely can be one and the same. Researchers at the University of Illinois argue that suicidal impulses may be motivated by a young person's desire for power—for control over their own lives and over other people. According to this theory, youth suicide is not always a cry for help, though it is often portrayed as such.

Fantasies of suicide "can be quite addictive and can involve an idea of personal fierceness, like Plath's fierceness," says Paul Joffe, a clinical psychologist who chairs the University of Illinois Suicide Prevention Team. "Young people may see suicide as a path toward experimenting with identity and with experience. We found that many are reluctant to give [this impulse] up—they enjoy being suicidal. They have a desire to feel alive through feeling suicidal."

The poems collected in Ariel capture this paradox through vital portraits of a self in the throes of what Freud called the death drive. "There's a sense that in Ariel, Plath is finally speaking in her most authentic voice," says Schultz. Plath's words drip with violent, nearly melodramatic metaphors, as in the poem "Death & Co": "He tells me how sweet/The babies look in their hospital/Icebox, a simple/Frill at the neck/Then the flutings of their Ionian/Death-gowns."

Today's teens are drawn both to the passionate bleakness of poems such as "Death & Co," and to the amusingly acidic The Bell Jar; but it is Plath's soap operatic relationship with Hughes, as well as her suicide, that Hollywood producers have cottoned to. The movie Sylvia and Middleton's biography focus rather single-mindedly on Plath's danse macabre with Hughes; neither work seems to be capable of resisting the urge to idealize death. Psychologists such as Jamison have no time for films or books that transmit this message. "Suicide is thought to have a romantic quality," says Jamison, bitterly. "I've gone to too many funerals—there's nothing romantic about that."