Sylvia plath, the well-bred malaise, and its confession in ‘Daddy’

Writing confessional lyrics, which are highly subjective and intensely personal, needs an extraordinarily sensitive mind that tends to break down while systematically probing that narrow and violent area of experience between the viable and the impossible, transmuted into poetry. This was Plath’s “way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.” Plath’s neurosis led her to commit suicide at the age of thirty-one, and since then critics have not been able to study her poetry away from her tempestuous life. The article studies a probable link between creativity and mental illness that Dean Keath Simonton calls ‘Mad-Genius Paradox,’ thereby floating a hypothesis that either it was Sylvia Plath’s writing that made her depressed and eventually influenced her decision to commit suicide or it was her depression and psychopathology that influenced her poetry, which resulted in her best collection Ariel. The article also studies her poem ‘Daddy,’ which is included in Ariel, hailed as “the Guernica of Modern Poetry,” more of a dying statement in a “controlled hallucination,” and concludes that Plath’s confessional mode, her psychosis, and her creative genius finds a zenith in the poem. ‘Daddy’ is a Freudian exercise where Plath finds her muse in her father while rejecting him and her ex-husband Ted Hughes as Fascists, who she adored as every woman does. The poem shows how the fall of the paternal ideal at the age of eight, resurrected in her matrimony with Ted Hughes, repeats itself, and therefore she should kill them both to be through.