Her Great Tap Root

Here is an essay written in memory and admiration of the great and late Sylvia Plath.

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my / great tap root: / It is what you fear. / I do not fear it: I have been there” (Elm 1-4). Doctors now believe that Sylvia Plath had a manic-depressive disorder that caused her to face moments of severe melancholy as well as episodes of astonishing creativity, of which it’s speculated that her most famous poetry and prose arose from. While these surges of creativity may have contributed to her completed works and overall legend, she showed in her poem “Elm” and her novel The Bell Jar that it was not those moments of clarity that made her work so brilliant, but her knowledge of pain and suffering.

Does a hierarchy exist within suffering? Plath does not expand on this question much, but the evidence shows that she believed in a deeper level of depression beyond what the normal person could understand. By describing herself as a tree, Plath acknowledged her outward beauty and success, yet she argued that her roots reached into depths of sadness. To establish her place on the hierarchy, she presented herself as the wizened tree who lived every day with her roots in an average person’s deepest fears.

Plath’s medical history was and is no secret. E. Shulman wrote an article about the long-terms effects her father’s death had on Plath’s life, which resulted in her warped vision of self and eventual suicide: “Soon after her father's death, Sylvia became obsessed with accomplishments. By age 9, she had had a poem published in a Boston newspaper” (Shulman).

“Is it the sea you hear in me, / Its dissatisfactions? / Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?” (Elm 5-7). Plath notes here the pain of both longing and silence, possibility contributed to the loss of her father early on in life or her mother’s inability to fill the hole in Sylvia’s life. Through comparing the sound of wind rushing through leaves to the sound of the ocean, she recalled those things which she longed to reach but could not because of her deeply bound roots; the whispering of the leaves around the tree made her remember all of the things she could not accomplish in life because of her mental illness. This not only shows her uninterrupted sense of incompleteness, but also her acknowledgement of the greatness she both could have and did achieve.

In line seven, Plath referred to the madness she had felt in the mental institution as nothing. She had her first stay in a mental institution after her first suicide attempt in 1953, a result of a depressive stage she experienced after the tragic death of a close friend (Shulman). During this stay and those occurring after, Plath underwent treatments of electroconvulsive and insulin shock therapy. Through this crucial line in “Elm,” she recalled the silence of the institution and in her mind as well. Her lack of thought and creativity was not only a side effect of the treatment she endured but was also a common indication of a depressive episode. When she identified her madness as her silenced thoughts and inability to divulge her feelings through words, she called attention away from the sadness and loneliness of institutionalization and rather focused on what it was like to be trapped in the mind that used to be her haven.

In May of this year, I was committed to a behavior health facility after I attempted suicide. During my three day stay, I felt crazier than I ever had in my life because of the silence constantly buzzing in my ears. Plath’s words and experiences feel familiar to me because I’ve experienced my own silence, which I described in the poem “From the Psych Ward.” Words are a writer’s way to unscramble the mess of the world and see behind its tangles. When a writer’s ability to take notes and express feeling is taken away, especially one as emotionally receptive as Sylvia Plath, so is his or her recovery. Her inability to string together these thoughts potentially added to the claustrophobia she felt while admitted, but it also drew parallels to the quietly stifling atmosphere of the institution to the state of her thoughts. This further explains her tree’s sense of longing to be near the sea expressed in line 5; she craved the beauty her mind could bring to the world if only it were not tied down by her illness and experiences.

Yet, these experiences are the very things that gave her a name in modern literature; she did not deny this, but embraced it. Through her times of darkness, she learned fear and how to express it. Sylvia Plath became the wizened oak tree through these trials, eternal and powerful through her accomplishments in the face of her own adversity. She did not praise her illness or the hardships it brought to her life, but she was able to find the one bright place for an abnormal person to be stuck in a world of normalcy: abnormality in a world of routines became something extraordinary.

E. Shulman disagreed with her thoughts on the complexity of her suffering, though he does not diminish her past: “Sylvia’s story is unusual in its clarity. More often, the childhood loss is more subtle and complex, although a failure to mourn, leading to narcissism, could be a universal road followed by all suicides” (Shulman). But E. Shulman was a biomedical researcher; not a writer. He followed the complexity of her issues as they concerned the brain and decision making processes. Though his claims seem to hold true biomedically, they cannot begin to explain the complexity and depth Plath expressed through her writing. To regain her creativity and ideas, she used writing to preserve her life as well as distinguish herself as a renowned poet and author. It was this act of distinguishing herself against those around her that revealed Sylvia Plath’s intentional placing of herself in a crowd where she felt uncomfortable.

Plath fervently expressed her differences from those around her, feelings she expressed more thoroughly through her character, Esther, in The Bell Jar. Esther, a smart and successful young woman, highlighted her feelings on being trapped in a world of normalcy that she neither wished to nor could conform to. Though Esther did deal with her own problems of institutionalization and suffering closely following Plath’s own story, the character made herself part of a crowd that she did not like while also not performing well enough to fit into it: “At about this point, I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains” (The Bell Jar 42).

After beginning the internship that was seemingly her road to perfection, Esther began to notice the difference between herself and the other girls she worked with. She had different priorities from them, which she celebrated because their interests seemed vapid to her. However, it seemed that their focuses in fashion and hairstyles were more beneficial for the magazine industry compared to Esther’s writing skills.

Unfortunately, this made me think of a famous article in my other field of study. There’s a Communications Theory called Cognitive Dissonance, which concludes when people have an attitude that conflicts with their behaviors, they will experience life-shifting changes in their identities. Esther could see that she did not fit in, but she saw an opportunity that could exist for her in the magazine industry in a perfect world; she had always succeeded before, and she could not understand why she was not continuing to succeed. Plath experienced this same shift in identity through the awards she did or did not win throughout her lifetime. Though no one will ever truly understand Plath’s behaviors to ease her pain, one can speculate about Plath’s actions as they relate to Esther’s. Minimal justification is a portion of Cognitive Dissonance Theory, which states a person will put out minimal effort to settle their breaks in identity. Esther exemplified this. She seldom went to her internship’s outings, but she did occasionally make an appearance. She was doing just enough to feel like she was succeeding without becoming a part of the crowd, therefore, she justified the pain in her abnormalities as a side effect to her eventual greatness.

Plath, though brilliant, was just like the rest of the writers in the world. Like the romantics and the gothics, like Cobain and Elliot Smith, like you and me and all writers, Esther found her greatness in her ability to write, though both her diligence in writing and disinterest in suggested activities was exactly what caused her pain in the first place. Through her writing, her ultimate form of suffering, she could seek out solace from the world around her.

So, what can I do to make my writing more like hers? I’m drowning in a world where English majors aren’t valued for their talents, but rather have their versatility challenged at every corner. I write poems that aren’t quite perfect but are at least filled with feeling and experience. I’m majoring in communications now, too, to make myself more hirable. Yet, people still ask me why English?

One day, I will write a poem like Sylvia Plath that screams back an answer of because there is nothing else.

#poetryanalysis #sickness #nature #pain #ESSAY