Three Possible Contributing Causes to Sylvia Plath’s Suicide at Age Thirty: Depression, Multiple Personality, Her Father and His Death When She Was Eight

Since I plan to read Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, and I want to read it in context, I have tried to orient myself to some of Plath’s interests and issues.

First, she had a history of recurrent depression, for which she was treated with ECT and psychotherapy.

Second, Plath’s undergraduate thesis was “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels.” She related the literary theme of the Double to “contradictions in man’s character” and “the complex question of identity,” and she discussed conflict between “real” and “counterfeit” selves (1).

Consistent with Plath’s interest in the theme of the double, there is multiple personality in some of her poems; for example, “In Plaster.” The poem begins:

“I shall never get out of this!  There are two of me now…”

It ends with the idea that her alternate personality should “perish” (which, since they share the same body, might be suicide):

“I used to think we might make a go of it together --

After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.

Now I see it must be one or the other of us.

She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,

But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit.

I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,

And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.”

How can the alternate personality both perish and miss her? Multiple personality has its roots in childhood, when death was not conceived of as final and permanent, a dangerous notion.

Third, her relationship with, and loss of, her father, when she was eight, may have been traumatic. She wrote the poem “Daddy,” expressing fear and hate of him, not long before she committed suicide.

1. Maria Theresa Ib. “Mind Over Myth?: The Divided Self in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/dividedself.html