3 Articles - R. Abbott

'I Bask in the Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry, and Women' This article basically stated taht mental illnesses plague female poets far more than either male poets or other women in general. Through scientifically conducted research, it was deduced that creative writers had significantly higher rates of mental illness - labeled the 'Sylvia Plath' effect. It was explained that mental illness was more prone to [female] poets because the type of people that are drawn to poetry to begin with are sometimes unstable and then the prolem worsens when poetry itself is unable to solve their problems. Research has also shown that writing can be very therapeutic, but the value of writing poetry is less clear. An interesting note from the article was that suicidal poets were found to use the first person singular more often than a control group. More specific to females, the reason why they are more mentally unstable is that as they produce high levels of work and expectations increase, they feel more stressed than males. 'Sylvia Plath and the Failure of Emotional Self-Repair Through Poetry' The author listed three dualities in her poetry: (1) balance between creative individual's use of the audience to serve her own narcissistic interests; (2) balance between destructive and constructive activity; (3) interplay between pretense and fantasy on the one hand and the acceptance of reality on the other. In a biographically portion of the article, Plath's adolescence was described as very painful and difficult, despite having great academic success. An interesting note about her first meeting with Ted Hughes was how she bit his cheek, drawing blood, and giving herself crashing, fighting to him. The articles also acknowledged the fact that Plath recognized that powerful destructive force wtihin herself through her poetry. Several tragic disasters which re-surface in her poetry were the death of her father, her miscarriage, her suicide attempts, and Ted Hughes cheating on her. It was said that the loss of Hughes was the final blow in Plath's short life. 'Sylvia Plath: Fusion with the Victim and Suicide' This was easily the most difficult of the three articles to make complete sense of. A revealing Plath quote in the reading was, "...it's quite amazing how i've gone around for most of my life as in the rarified atmosphere under a bell jar," stated well before she ever wrote he book. The author's hypothesis linked suicidal behavior (like Plath's), Christ-like empathy for victims, and poetic sensibility. The author also believed that Plath's poetry abled her to vent her rage for a brief period of time, but it would all come back once she completed the writing. It was also stated that, while reading Plath's poem chronologically, the forces opposing death as constuctively dealt with until in the last few, where this force weakens and dies - along with Plath herself.