Mental Illness and Literary Form in the Writings of Sylvia Plath

This was published in The Paper Shell Review's Spring 2024 edition. 

Sylvia Plath explores mental illness in her poetry collection, Ariel, and novel, The Bell Jar, though the different literary forms of each affect her representations of the nuances of depression and anxiety. Plath’s poetry style is confessional, and so, she wrote to understand her own mind, stating in a 1962 radio interview: “I don't think I could live without [writing poetry]. It's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem when I'm writing one” (Plath). Poetry can often evoke emotion through its use of lexical, morphological, and phonological choices to establish the narrator's psychological state without introducing a narrative plot. Since The Bell Jar is prose, it cannot use the same linguistic features to explore mental illness. Therefore, the poetic form of Arieldepicts depression pragmatically, while the more versatile features of prose in The Bell Jar mean critical interest has often given depression an aesthetic mediation.

Space is crucial to both The Bell Jar and Ariel, and Plath experiments with the limits of reality and form to represent an individual's space. In “Elm,” the speaker is a tree, “I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: / It is what you fear” (lines 1-2). These opening lines demonstrate that the tree is content within its own space, using its roots to explore the boundaries of this, and so, feels comfortable. However, whom the tree addresses, presumably a human, fears the confines of space. This is seen in The Bell Jar where the more realistic form uses the protagonist to explore her limits in New York. Plath uses heat in her novel to represent the domineering power of the confines of an individual in the city. The novel starts by describing the heat: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York” (Plath 1). Pronouns portray the connection between the heat “it,” society, “they,” and the protagonist, “I”. The impact of the heat continues when the narrator equates the electrocution of the Rosenbergs to the heat of the New York summer, as a metaphor for lingering social conscience: “Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat” (Plath 1). Not only do the streets suffer from the heat, but it usurps the individual and so people become an element of the city; they are vessels of “cindery dust”. Thus, the poetic form uses the fantastical, and the novel form uses the real to experiment with the boundaries of the human in relation to the space they inhabit. 

Perhaps the most significant difference between prose and poetry is poetry's phonological features. Throughout Ariel, Plath uses repetition to create personality, such as in “Medusa,” a semi-autobiographical poem about her relationship with her mother: 

I didn't call you. 

I didn’t call you at all. 

Nevertheless, nevertheless 

You steamed to me over the sea (lines 21-24).

Plath repeats “I didn't call you,” adding the adverbial “at all” in the second instance to depict the narrator's defensiveness, creating a character who is independent of her mother. The repeated sibilance in “Nevertheless, nevertheless” mimics the echo of hissing snakes, and the multiple voices present a cognitive dissonance of the conflicting thoughts within the narrator's mind. Therefore, the phonological features are another linguistic level Plath uses to create personality. 

The structure of prose is noticeably different to poetry because poetry can use enjambment and caesura to create its own pace. In “Cut,” the narrator becomes obsessed with a cut on her thumb. Plath represents the immediacy of the first two lines in the enjambment and absence of verbs when the reader can infer from the title that the speaker has cut themself: “What a thrill – / My thumb instead of an onion” (lines 1-2). The “thrill” this causes suggests a fascination with self-harm and offers a new interpretation of the human body and whether it is sacred, or an experimental form. 

Plath employs repetition and alliteration for meditative purposes in The Bell Jar. After leaving Lenny’s apartment, the protagonist takes a bath: “I said to myself: ‘Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more’” (Plath 19). Listing the people and places that cause her anxiety reduces their threat, while the repetitive “dissolving” distances them, where the cyclical plosive “d” and sibilant “s” suggest their emanating further away from her. So, while prose and poetry share linguistic features, they convey similar emotions differently. In this scene from The Bell Jar, we see the protagonist peaceful for the first time, where the same features as those in “Cut” go further than express anxiety by exploring a remedy for it.

From the start of The Bell Jar, complex sentences allow for the unraveling of the protagonist's obsession with self-harm and death: “It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it was like being burned alive all along your nerves” (Plath 1). The subordinate clause opening the final sentence in the first paragraph, “it had nothing to do with me,” suggests this fascination with harm and death is beyond the protagonist's control and wider societal intervention on the individual. 

Furthermore, she is fully aware of her difference from others when she declares: 

Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl… so poor she can't afford a magazine… ends up steering New York like her own private car. 

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus (Plath 2). 

The “they'd” juxtaposes the “I,” where the contraction hides the conditional tense; it hides her presumptions of what people would say. The complex sentences suggest the anxiety of considering what others think of her, which contrasts with the simple sentences of what she knows she feels and thinks. She acknowledges the truth of her emotions, and the speculation of what others think, and the change in tone signifies this. Again, the narrator dehumanizes herself, this time to a “numb trolley-bus,” suggesting that society has desensitized her into a vehicle that carries expectations instead of her own desires. She happily accuses society of causing her morbid fascination, though she does not address why, nor does she present any desire to embrace New York and the people she meets. The first-person narrator allows for a true insight into the protagonist’s thoughts as opposed to someone else speaking for her, while the regular stanza structure throughout Ariel demonstrates a sense of confinement where the speaker is not free to express their thoughts. 

Language can express meaning in both poetic forms and prose, though a focus on syllables in poetry can express meaning to a further extent. In only five syllables, the opening line of “Ariel,” “Statis in darkness,” describes the experience of sitting on a stagnant horse while waiting for dawn (line 1). This presents similar themes to “Sheep in Fog,” where the title is a metaphor for loneliness. The final two line-endings, “a heaven” which is “a dark water,” present a duality, which could project an insight into Plath's own depression as a force that only allows one to foresee “dark[ness]” (lines 14 and 15). 

While Plath's prose and poetry both explore the nuances of depression and isolation, the poetic form can express this more quickly in syllables rather than the lengthy figurative language of her prose. In The Bell Jar, the protagonist similarly feels isolated, such as when she describes how she “felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo” (Plath 3). The metaphor of herself as a “tornado” demonstrates the mental anguish of her disconnection from the energy of her surrounding New York environment. Instead, she is in this dizzying experience. While the eye of the storm is generally calm, for her it is the most worrying position because she awaits the climax of being part of the “tornado”. In “Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar as Neoliberal Bildungsroman,” Aaron Schneeberger even argues that the “suggestive mobilization of bodily sensations to convey an understanding of a rarified emotional state thus demonstrates Esther's intuitive sense of the central role of embodiment in her mental life” (542). The novel uses characters to explore “bodily sensations” that match the features of this form while Ariel describes events more than the characters, and so cannot use the human body to further illustrate the power of emotion.  

The shorter nature of poetry means each word contains much more power and presence. In “Lady Lazarus,” for example, the speaker describes suicide attempts, and the shortness of the lines means each word is largely emphasized which heightens the horror of mental illness:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well. 

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real. 

I guess you could say I've a call (lines 43-48).

Separating “dying” from the verb and complement, “Is an art,” paradoxically, augments the meaning and connotations of each while the enjambment brings them into comparison. The speaker then proudly declares, “I do it exceptionally well. // I do it so it feels like hell.” Again, the separation of the two syntactically similar lines over a stanza uses rhyming couplets to connect them and convey Plath's suicide attempts. The anaphora “I do it” continues “I do it so it feels real,” highlighting the speaker's absolute fascination with death. The speaker’s distress transfers to the reader when they state, “I guess you could say I've a call.” The speaker comes to view their suicide attempts as their innate, predestined purpose and cannot foresee a happy future. In fact, in “Toward a Poetics of Terror: Sylvia Plath and the Instant of Death,” Adam Beardsworth suggests that “Plath's poetic intensity and her recurring fascination with the connections between poetry, death, and suicide yielded a poetry that extends beyond catharsis and domestic revolt” (119). Plath's poetic form has boundless opportunities that “extend beyond” the expected, where Plath incites the same emotions in the reader. The full stops at the end of each line demonstrate the focus on the present and depression’s ability to cause one to glamourize death where the number of suicide attempts becomes competitive and blocks out any future hope. 

In The Bell Jar, through the novel form, Plath uses short paragraphs to separate the narrator's thoughts and the events of the plot. From the start, this structure allows the reader to understand the narrator's feelings as an absolute outsider. One example of this is when they are at Lenny's apartment: “The two of them didn’t stop jitterbugging during the intervals. I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine-paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground” (Plath 15). The narrator firstly categorizes the “two of them,” where she excludes herself. The choice of “jitterbugging” mocks their dance to provide herself with a sense of superiority as though she can only find happiness in separating herself from the world around her. Nonetheless, she still feels infinitesimal as she feels herself “shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling,” slowly becoming part of the interior. Her outsideness dehumanizes her and she descends the past to become equivalent to the ranch-style décor of Lenny’s apartment. This could be a critique of the 1950s expectation of women to be homemakers, where they become part of the home themselves. She then compares herself to a “hole in the ground,” a nuisance to the urban landscape waiting to be filled, and therefore, a metaphor for her awaiting her death. The form of a novel has different features to that of a poem, where Plath’s poetry demonstrates the intensity of emotion while Plath’s prose allows for the journey from feeling to depression. 

The poetic form may be able to express emotion in the same way as prose can, but this does not mean it can detail depression to the same extent. It is this detailing of depression, though which allows the space for it to be aestheticized. In Ariel, Plath experiments with sound, punctuation, syllables, repetition, and rhyme to represent the speaker’s feelings, while in The Bell Jar, Plath uses paragraphing, a first-person narrator, metaphors as well as repetition and alliteration to delve further into suggesting how the narrator has been affected. Therefore, although poetic form condenses the magnitude of emotion, sometimes the lengthier syntax of prose is needed to freely explore this. 

Works Cited

Beardsworth, Adam. “Toward a Poetics of Terror: Sylvia Plath and the Instant of Death.” 

Confessional Poetry in the Cold War, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 117–46, link-springer-com.uoelibrary.idm.oclc.org/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-93115-5_5. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023.

Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Faber & Faber, 1965.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Faber & Faber, 1963.

Plath, Sylvia. “Sylvia Plath discusses poetry in 1962”. Interviewed by Peter Orr. Sylvia Plath 

Info, Sept. 2015, https://sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-bit-of-professional-sylvia-plath.html. Accessed 19 Nov. 2021. 

Schneeberger, Aaron. “Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as Neoliberal Bildungsroman.” Modern 

Fiction Studies, vol. 67, no. 3, 2021, pp. 542-567. ProQuest, https://uoelibrary.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/sylvia-plath-s-i-bell-jar-as-neoliberal/docview/2578188849/se-2.