warning: hardly ever updated

Having had studied Ariel for two years, the inevitable question arises: what killed sylvia plath?

was it her husband's adultery?
her children's eventual failure as a source of anchorage?
(These children are after something, with hooks and cries,/ And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults. 'berck plage')
her "vulturous boredom" with life's mundane? ('hanging man')

i say, it was her intelligence.

compare Ariel to Another Place! look at how the former is so much more superior in form, literary technique, meaning, ORIGINALITY. her geniousity is undeniable, but that likely led to her arrogance.

she wants so desperately wants to know this "one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me", and yet before she gets an answer, she so contemptously remarks: "I know why you will not give it to me, You are terrified/ The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it".

of course, this is if you accept my interpretation that this birthday present she so wants is meaning to life, and the 'you' in question is God.

how i came to this conclusion?

1. perpetual christian references:

"the elect one"

"Let us eat our last supper at it"

"My god, what a laugh!'' , and again "But my god..."

"Let it not come by word of mouth"

2. she questions every aspect of life, thus reflecting her search/ questioning life/ asking the why, through looking at the what.

female domesticity: "When I am quiet at my cooking .../Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, /Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules."

motherhood: "The diaphanous satins of a January window/ White as babies' bedding"

death (which she thinks to be the meaning to life (i.e. the birthday present she wants). Partly true, but fatally lacking in perspective. no pun intended.) :"If it were death I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.../There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. "

3. what else can relate to the whole wide world, and yet relate to intimately to the individual, simultaneously?

"It stands at my window, big as the sky. [and yet] breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center/ Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history. "

thus we see that meaning to life applies to the whole physical existence of the world, and also to the individual's own existence.

the last time i brought it up in class, mr sas said it wasn't applicable cos 'meaning to life' is not a recurrent theme in Ariel. But look, the human desire to belong to a collective whole, to find anchorage (marriage, motherhood), her rejection of total female domesticity, all stem from a need to know WHY. Why live, marry, why mother, why subscribe to social prescriptions. thus, meaning to life!

so back to my point that it was her arrogance killed her.

if only she had humbly asked, she would have known!

'For this is what the high and lofty One says— he who lives forever, whose name is holy: "I live in a high and holy place, but am also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite."' isaiah 57:15

and here you have the Plath essay i'd always wanted to write :)