It’s been 50 years since Sylvia Plath committed suicide in her North London flat, yet her writings and poems continue to inspire a new generation of artists.
Girls creator Lena Dunham was among the artists who have contributed to The Guardian’s recent retrospective on Plath, her work, and what it means to artists of today. In her piece, Dunham wonders whether Plath would have met the same untimely death had she been born in a different time.
‘Would she, like me, have found a cosy coffeehouse environment on the internet, a way to connect with people who understood her aesthetic and validated her experience? Would she have been less dependent on the approval of viewers and critics and more aware of the positive effect her book was having on splintered psyches and girls with short bangs everywhere? Or would that kind of connectedness and access to unmitigated and misspelled negativity have driven her even madder?’ Dunham writes for The Guardian.
Ultimately, Dunham says that she asked her 700,000 Twitter followers to sum up in 140 characters what Plath’s most famous work, The Bell Jar, means to them.
‘My favorite response was a simple “it made me feel less alone.” Because that’s how it made me feel, too. And that’s what I think art is for. Sylvia was just like us. Only she didn’t have The Bell Jar.’
American poet Sharon Olds writes how The Bell Jar reminds her of the house she grew up in, noting that the despair found in the novel was like nothing she’d ever read before.
‘When I think of Sylvia Plath, I am in awe of her intelligence, her language, her wit, her consonantal music – her sheer gift, and what must have been her drive, as its guardian, possessor, possessee, to realise it,’ she writes.
Olds published her first book when she was 37, and remembers how she shied away from poetry out of a dread of Plath’s fate. Yet when she finally began to write her own poems, the latest of which won the 2012 TS Elliot prize, Olds acknowledged that she owed Plath an immense debt.
‘My students at New York University love her work. I look at them and remember she was only 30 when she died. I tell them to talk back to any inner voices they may hear saying mean things about them. I tell them their lives are a treasure to us all. I tell them to take their vitamins,’ she said.
A Visit from the Goon Squad author Jennifer Egan writes about the affinity she felt with Plath after reading her work when she was a teenager.
‘I had never encountered a narrative voice so much like the one inside my head: fluttery, self-conscious, goofy, melodramatic. Plath and I were alike, I was sure, yet what I retained from The Bell Jar was mostly a sense of the narrator’s irrepressible effervescence. Her suffering, and the foreshadowing of tragedy, made less impact.’
Commentator and poet Tess Taylor also discussed how Plath’s work is received today during an interview with NPR.
‘Now that Ted Hughes is dead, too, Plath scholars and Hughes scholars, long embattled, are looking at their collected papers as a unit, examining the two literary lions side by side,’ Taylor said. ‘And perhaps we read Plath differently now because we’ve changed too. I like to believe that women have made so many strides in the last 50 years that Plath’s legacy can haunt us less. Reading Plath now, I admire how her writing breaks boundaries, explores the ambivalence of motherhood and plays in new ways with female roles. The voice she crafted is macabre, tender, theatrical, subversive and even funny. Her poems are otherworldly. They document mid-century life even as they unsettle it.’
Not all celebrations of Plath’s legacy have been met with positivity. Just recently Faber was met with a barrage of crititicism for their newly released 50th anniversary cover of The Bell Jar, which features a young woman fixing her makeup and which many have argued brands the novel as ‘chick lit.’
For crisis and suicide prevention support, contact Lifeline‘s 24 hour crisis line on 13 11 14. For more information and help with depression contact your doctor or Beyond Blue.
