Ex Husband Plath Analysis

As a confessional writer, Plath openly addresses issues and topics that were never discussed publicly before. Plath incorporates her own voice into her works, and therefore her depression impacts her work greatly. While “Critics praised her imaginative, direct verse, that was sometimes witty and at other moments somber.” (Kort), critics lacked the knowledge that Plath herself suffered from the sorrow that appears works. For example, in The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood turns a drunken friend to the curb, despite her pleas for aid. She “decided [decides] the only thing to do was to dump her on the carpet and shut and lock [her] door and go back to bed”.(The Bell Jar,?) Heedless to her friends cry for help, Esther turns her away not out of spite

These feelings drastically impact her works and demonstrate her struggle with mental illness. In addition to feelings of worthlessness resulting from her depression, Plath experienced numerous tragic events which appear heavily in her works. In response to these dreadful experiences, Plath begins to feel worthless and doubt herself as a writer and person. Plath’s childhood traumas and childhood relationships deeply impact her work as well as her life. In an essay, her Ex Husband states that her attempted suicide “had grown from the decisive event in her childhood, which was the death of her father when she was eight.”(Hughes, “On Sylvia Plath”) her poetry “grew out of terrible and shattering and inally unbearable expierences”(Souces 4) Hughes attributes Plath’s depression to her childhood relationships, specifically the death of her father. Her father appears as a theme throughout her works because this event deeply impacted Plath’s life. Plath references her father in her works outright and also in her references to bees. Plath, also herself denotes the relationship between her father and her suicide in the poem “Daddy” saying “I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you” (“Daddy”, Plath, 76). Plath realizes as Hughes did that her childhood relationships and the tragic death of her father lead to her feelings of worthlessness, which caused her suicide attempt. Additionally, the themes of bees appear because of her father’s hobby as a beekeeper. In beekeeper’s daughter “hierarchal in your frock coat, maestro of the bees you move among the many breasted hives, My heart under your foot, sister of a stone” (“The Beekeeper’s Daughter”, Plath). Plath’s view of her father as an overbearing figure causes her much torment. The beekeeper steps on her heart symbolizing the pain that her father causes in her life. This pain leads to