Sylvia Plath Research Paper

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts to German immigrant, Otto Plath and American-born Aurelia Plath. Plath's parents, fueled by their admiration of education and gifts in the literary world, gave Plath an early start in the venture of becoming an author (Critical Insights 13, 14). However, tragedy struck only nine days after Plath's eighth birthday when her father died of an embolism of the lung. This event is alluded to in several of Plath's works, including The Bell Jar ("The Bell Jar" 23). After Plath's father's death, Plath and her remaining family moved from the seaside inland to Wellesley, heavily impacting her imagination for the worse, but providing her with a far better schooling system and quality

During her undergraduate time at Smith, Plath began experiencing symptoms of intense depression. Plath cites during this time in one of her journals, "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative- whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it ("Sylvia Plath"). In summer of 1952, Plath won a contest that gave her the opportunity to receive a month's employment in New York, but Plath's depression was not alleviated ("The Bell Jar" 22). At the age of nineteen, after not being accepted into a summer writing program, Plath attempted suicide by ingesting sleeping pills. She survived the attempt, but received electroshock therapy that greatly influenced the latter half of The Bell

In December of that same year, Plath returned to her therapy sessions which forced her to analyze familial issues, and Plath audited a poetry course at Boston University where she was introduced to confessional style poetry. Plath became pregnant with her first child and went back to England because she believed England offered more opportunities for new writers (Critical Insights 25). That April she gave birth to a baby girl, Frieda. In the year following the birth of Frieda, Plath experienced both a miscarriage and an appendectomy. She began to work on The Bell Jar and in 1962, gave birth to a boy, Nicholas. By that summer, however, her marriage ended when Hughes left Plath and their two children, causing Plath to write poems at a shocking and consistent rate ("The Bell Jar" 24). "'I am joyous... writing like mad-have managed a poem a day before breakfast.... Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me,' she wrote on 12 October 1962,"