Does Writing Create Psychological Distress?
The Negative Effects of Writing on Female Authors – Sylvia Plath
Sep 5, 2009
Not all scholars believe that Sylvia Plath suffered because of her chosen craft. In her article “’This Is Not Death, It Is Something Safer’: A Psychodynamic Approach to Sylvia Plath,” Benigna Gerisch looks at Plath’s life and the psychological conditions she suffered from to draw a larger picture of the predicament of female suicide and its possible causes. But even with her psychodynamic approach, Gerisch’s article is an “attempt to show that Plath’s life and work contain all of the aspects that are highly relevant for a comprehensive understanding of psychosexual development and female suicidality within the context of a male defined cultural order” (737).
Sylvia Plath and The School of New Criticism
One part of the “male defined cultural order” (Gerisch 737) of Plath’s life was the school of New Criticism. No one could argue that New Criticism was a feminist or even feminine approach to literature with its strict order of formalism and unyielding textual analysis. While literary criticism was certainly not the only way in which Plath was subjugated by masculinity, it was very influential and problematic for her, as shown in Vicki Graham’s article, “Reconstructed Vase: Sylvia Path and New Critical Aesthetics.” While Gerisch believes Plath suffered from “profound depressive and narcissistic problems” (738) due to familial relationships during her childhood which resulted in later psychological distress as evidenced by her writings, Graham believes the standards and aesthetics of New Criticism caused Plath great anxiety and left her “with an unresolved aesthetic problem with which she will struggle for the rest of her life” (46).
No person, especially writers it would seem, has a perfect idyllic childhood. Family life is wrought with problems, struggles, and difficulties. While these problems may have eventually led to Plath’s suicidal state and actual suicide, it does not explain all the problems Plath suffered from, specifically those she encountered while at Smith College when she was initially beginning her career as a writer. The contradictory nature of New Criticism troubles writers even today, and as a female in the 1950s (especially if Plath did suffer from the conditions Gerisch suggests that she did because of poor family relationships, including one with her father) Plath would have found it difficult to conform to New Critical standards.
Psychological Distress Created by New Criticism
T.S. Eliot, one of the foremost members of the New Critical school, believed in “[t]he necessity that he [the writer] shall conform, that he shall cohere” (406) but how can Plath, a woman, conform and cohere if she writes differently and has experienced life differently than the males who are dictating the tradition to be followed? (For the purposes of this article we are assuming that men and women think differently and as such experience life differently and therefore, write differently.)
How is Plath to handle “be[ing] judged by the standards of the past” (406)? How was she to cope with “the continual surrender” (407) demanded by the New Criticism of poets? In one way, she coped very well. She tried diligently to produce poetry to fit the standards of New Criticism. Complex rhyme schemes appear in much of her poetry, such as in “Lady Lazarus” (Plath 6-9) with its short finely crafted lines, and also in “Daddy”: “Bit my pretty red heart in two. / I was ten when they buried you. / At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do” (58).
Yet at the same time, one could reply that she did not cope very well with the masculine demands of New Criticism because she was constantly conforming to a standard unnatural to her and that this constant quest for perfection and the constant struggle to conform to the “inherent contradiction in New Critical descriptions of poems as well-crafted, unified wholes whose parts have an organic relationship to each other” (Graham 44). Plath realized that “[i]f a poem is consciously wrought…it cannot also be organic” (44) and the majority of her writing illustrates the desire to solve this complex paradox.
The Effect on Plath's Writing
While Garisch may be right in her assessment of Plath’s childhood and subsequent psychological problems, there is no doubt that her choice to be a writer contributed to her psychological distress as well. Perhaps, without the added stress of conforming to unreasonable male expectations, Plath’s life would have turned out differently. But then of course we would not have the fabulous collection of her poetry that we do have today. Perhaps she would have lived longer, or written more, or differently, if she did not feel compelled to exercise her expression in compliance with the dominant “male defined cultural order” (Gerisch 737). Plath’s choice to be a woman writer in a male world caused her many internal struggles and her attempts to fulfill male expectations may have certainly driven her crazy beyond other factors in her life.
Sources
Easthope, Anthony. “Reading the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” English 43:177 (1994): 223-235.
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Criticism: Major Statements. Eds. Charles Kaplan and William Davis Anderson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. 404-410.
Gerisch, Benigna. “’This Is Not Death, It Is Something Safer’: A Psychodynamic Approach to Sylvia Plath.” Death Studies 22 (1998): 735-761.
Graham, Vicki. “Reconstructed Vase: Sylvia Plath and New Critical Aesthetics.” Texas Review 15 (1994): 44-65.
“New Criticism.” The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Eds. Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Perennial Classics, 1965.
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