I am, I am, I am. Sylvia Plath's heart was beating and she was translating it the best way she knew how. For a woman who was self-aware to a rare degree, what else could this sound be other than a relentless reminder of her own existence? Many have pointed to his constant self-examination and introspection as evidence of idiosyncratic narcissism. However, it is clear that these tendencies were simply part of Plath's lifelong struggle to understand herself. Knowing she was alive wasn't enough – she needed to know who she was and what she was supposed to accomplish in the short time she was given. Reflecting on his childhood, this incessant desire to identify more explicitly, which at first seems like a selfish quest, begins to seem more reasonable. After her father died when she was eight, Plath threw herself into her studies, earning high grades and an eventual scholarship to Smith College (O'Reilly 356). There, she continued to enjoy academic success and had several of her short stories and poems published in various magazines. However, in 1953, Plath's carefully constructed world began to disintegrate over the course of a summer that she would later immortalize in The Bell Jar. She was denied admission to a writing course at Harvard, began suffering from insomnia, and felt increasingly overwhelmed by her inability to measure up to the high standards she had set for herself. fixed (O'Reilly 356). These increasing pressures, coupled with the terror and depression Plath felt following failed electroshock therapy, led her to attempt suicide on August 24 by overdosing on sleeping pills (O'Reilly 356). Although she survived, returning to Smith and graduating summa cum laude two years later, she lived in fear that her life would once again spiral out of control (O'Reilly 356). In trying to understand exactly how she had failed, Plath drew a sharp distinction between the inner and outer self. She decided that her efforts to maintain a perfect personality were doomed from the start, not because of any mistake on her part, but because of the simple fact that her weaker, imperfect self had remained inside, struggling under the increasing weight of his constructed being. mask. To achieve her initial goal, Plath had to do more than pretend: she had to become the ideal, constructing a perfect self from the inside out. From that moment on, everything she wrote reflected the process by which she attempted to recreate herself. Motivated by the intolerable feeling of disconnect between her outer personality and her inner self, as well as a persistent feeling of "facelessness", she began by isolating herself emotionally, striving to purify herself by deepening the gap between self and the other. . Simultaneously, she began projecting facets of her personality onto people she believed represented similar traits, mentally transforming them into one-dimensional characters and stripping them of their humanity. Then, she rejected these individuals from her life, hypostasizing the process of exorcising her own undesirable characteristics. However, Plath never managed to complete this process and emerge from the chaos fully formed. At that time, she was living in Devon, England, with her husband and two children. After learning of [her husband's] affair with a mutual friend, she insisted that they separate and moved to London, frantically writing poems that would later be considered some of her best (O'Reilly 357) . Once again, circumstances combined to overwhelm him, and after struggling to overcome aher last depression, she committed suicide on February 11, 1963 (O'Reilly 357). Sylvia Plath's lifelong quest for a clearly defined personal identity led her to craft her own persona, deliberately isolating the Self from the Other, dehumanizing and then rejecting others as a metaphor for the selection of her own selves, and beginning to construct an ultimate identity, a process which is clearly reflected in his autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, his Collected Poems and his personal journals. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Plath's all-consuming need for a concrete identity was ultimately rooted in the disconnect she felt between herself and her self interior, a divide that she used as a major theme in almost everything she wrote. However, it is important to note that Plath originally saw this sense of lack of identity as a motivating force, an emptiness that served to inspire rather than destroy. During her time at Smith, she wrote: "So you go rotting in the ground, and then you say, what is this? typed, which could be launched into a thumbnail sketch… “She was the kind of girl…” and end in 25 words or fewer” (Journals 64). These feelings are much more optimistic than those that follow, but they even reveal the beginnings of instability and a desperate desire to succeed. Over time, his need to define himself became even more pressing. In her poem “Three Women,” she writes: “There are the clothes of a fat woman whom I do not know. There is my comb and my brush. There is a void. I’m suddenly so vulnerable,” revealing his belief that one cannot be resilient or fulfilled without first knowing one’s identity (Collected Poems 184). Elena Ciobanu states that in Plath's work, “suffering manifests itself poetically as a fissure…between the physical and psychic planes” (Ciobanu 128). It was during Sylvia's time with Smith that this concept became a major theme in her writing. For example, surrounded by other students in the library, she wrote: “I sit here without identity: without a face... Yet I know that at home, there is my room, full of my presence. There's my date this weekend: someone believes I'm a human being, not just a name. And these are the only indications that I am a whole person,” showing that she felt others saw her as a coherent individual, incapable of perceiving the conflicts she saw so clearly ( Diaries 26). Believing that others did not understand the separation she felt, the distance between her inner self and the person she appeared to be on the surface widened. On pages 148 and 174 of The Bell Jar, Esther, Plath's fictional double, refers to her reflection as "the person in the mirror", an alien image that she cannot reconcile with the person she really feels. Plath's situation was compounded by the inescapable feeling that time was running out. She captured this concept best in The Bell Jar, writing: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree of history. From the end of each branch, like a large purple fig, a wonderful future called to me and winked at me... I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, dying of hunger, simply because I could not not to decide which of the figs I would choose" (Bell Jar 77). It is clear that her inability to act and the anxiety she felt as a result prompted Plath to begin her doomed quest for identity. After seeking to differentiate the Self and the Other in order to identify more clearly, Plath found herself emotionally isolated.decided that previous attempts to understand herself had failed due to the simple difficulty of distinguishing between thoughts, feelings, and characteristics that came from her organically and those that came from elsewhere. On page 47 of his Unabridged Journals, we read: “How much of my brain is voluntarily mine? How much is it not a buffer if what I have read, heard and experienced? Of course, I make a sort of synthesis of what I encounter, but is that all that differentiates me from others? Clearly, Plath feared being too tied to the rest of the world to understand who she was without her influence, outside of the context lent by others. Therefore, she began to create a clearer distinction between Self and Other, “purifying” herself in order to observe the result. Here we can see the origins of Plath's “ideal of a self uncontaminated by others” (Bonds 50). However, this distinction did not lead to the clarity Plath hoped for, but rather to the feeling that she was "like a numb trolley bus" and "very still and very empty" (Bell Jar 2-3). Later, in “Two Campers in Cloud Country,” she evokes this feeling, saying, “I lean toward you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here” (Collected Poems 144). Although at first she rightly perceives this distance as isolation, she eventually sees it as a successful step toward discovering her identity. By becoming "numb as a fossil", placing the emotional equivalent of millennia between herself and the rest of the world, she has retreated to a place where nothing can affect or distort her character. From this point on, purity became a major theme in much of his work, initially represented as something desirable. After a difficult evening, Esther Greenwood of the Bell Jar said to herself while bathing: "New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving and none of them matter anymore. I don't know them, I don't know them. have never known and I am very pure” (20 However, over time, purity frequently becomes associated with illness and instability. In “Fever 103°”, the delusional narrator declares: “I am too much. pure for you or anyone,' and in 'Tulips,' which is set in a hospital, she writes, 'I'm a nun now, I've never been so pure.'" (Collected Poems 161/232 ). Eventually, Plath realized that even when she was free of new influences from the outside world, she still carried old imperfections within her. She refers to this feeling in "Elm", saying: "I am haunted by a scream. At night it moves, searching with its fangs for something to love. I am terrified of this dark thing that sleeps. in me." Poems 193). Now that she had defined herself as she existed, she could begin the process of eliminating the "dark things" within her and becoming a version of herself without such flaws. Through a process of dehumanizing, or "flattening," others and then rejecting them as a means of abandoning the parts of herself that they represented, Plath believed that she would be able to construct a free identity from any external influence and any imperfection. This view of others as instruments that she could use to achieve her goal is amplified in The Bell Jar, in which Esther displays a general contempt for others, frequently describing them as one-dimensional duplicates of herself. Notably, Doreen and Betsy, the magazine's guest editors, represent two opposing sides of Plath: her brash, worldly side and her purer, almost saccharine side. Although Esther originally thinks that Doreen is closer to representing the person she wishes to be, saying, "All thatthat she said was like a secret voice coming straight from my own bones", she eventually gets rid of both, refusing to imitate either (Bell 7). Likewise, in "Fever 103° ", she renounces the men of her past and the impurities they represent, writing: "Not you, nor him, nor him, nor him. (My dissolving self, old whore in petticoats) - to Heaven". (Collected Poems 232). Clearly, Plath believed that the next step in perfecting one's identity was the rejection of impure and imperfect people. Her diaries reflect that She took this approach not only in her writings, but also in reality, assessing men's suitability based on how they fit into a very specific preconstructed mold and making little effort to differentiate them. reading her journals will notice that the names eventually blur together, a faceless parade of identical memories. Over time, her poetry became imbued with the idea that she had a "good" and a "bad" self, conflicting camps that were beginning to imperil her “In Plaster” most directly reflects this new concept, as Plath writes: “There are two of me now: this new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, and the white person. is definitely the superior person… She wanted to leave me. , she thought she was superior, and I kept her in the dark, and she was resentful” (Collected Poems 158-159). By recklessly rejecting everything she deemed unfit, Plath had done more than dehumanize others: she had begun to dehumanize herself, dismembering her identity almost beyond recognition. She writes: “I see myself flat, ridiculous, a shadow of cut paper between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, and I have no face, I wanted to erase myself” (Collected Poems 161). His efforts to reject all external bonds in order to preserve the self had left him without others to nourish and protect him when Sylvia refused to do so (Bonds 52). Although Plath finally felt that she had eliminated her imperfections and could begin to build a new identity, she was unaware of how unstable her foundations had become. Although Sylvia's writings reference the concept of rebirth and new beginnings, it is clear that she was never truly able to construct her ultimate identity. Despite the surprising clarity with which Plath depicts Esther's descent into madness, her reemergence into society in the final pages of The Bell Jar rings false, as if the author lacks the personal knowledge that endows the rest of the novel its disconcerting realism. Esther returns to the world, claiming to be reborn, but the reader cannot help but think that she is far from recovered. An unstable new beginning is also hinted at in “Three Women,” as the narrator says: “I am myself again. nothing happened. Nothing that can't be erased, torn and discarded, started again…. This woman who meets me at the windows – she is cared for” (Collected Poems 184), although here the poet still clings to the veneer of recovery, another. » reveals the truth: “I am a wound leaving the hospital. I am a wound they let go" (Collected Poems 184). Clearly, Plath was extremely vulnerable and far from perfect, feeling abandoned by others and betrayed by the spirit she had previously relied on to help her succeed As the diaries say she kept during the last years of her life were destroyed by her husband after his death, only her last poems remain as allusions to the fact that she began to consider. death as the only way to become a whole person If she couldn't.embody perfection in life, perhaps. » She could in her memory. After all, others had never been able to see past his exterior to the chaos within. The last poem Plath ever wrote began: “The woman is perfect. His corpse wears the smile of accomplishment… His bare feet seem to say: “We have come this far, it is finished” (Collected Poems 272). She had finally understood that the Self could only escape being “stunted, shrunken, distorted.” , by…outcrops of heredity" by achieving a semblance of perfection in death, free from the contaminating influence of life (Diaries 31). Six days later, Plath ended her life. Her efforts were unsuccessful to identify and achieve perfection left Plath without external connections on which she could rely, because the process by which she attempted to achieve her goals required her to depend solely on herself. Destiny makes it clear that an identity entirely formed by the rejection of the Other cannot survive or be resilient because it is simply the by-product of a negative reaction rather than an honest one. self-discovery, Plath unwittingly revealed that her attempts at purification had resulted in a dismemberment of her identity, a fundamental disruption in the necessary relationship between Self and Other (Links 52). It is also likely that Plath's perfectionist tendencies contributed to her feelings of failure and isolation. No matter how others perceived her, she remained perpetually convinced that her identity was strong enough, perfect or coherent enough. A newspaper article, from 1952, reads almost like a premonition of what was to come. "I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow...I do not know who I am, where I am going - and it is I who must decide the answers to these hideous questions" (Diaries 149). Undoubtedly, his efforts to destroy his connections with others and strive for perfection led to failure. However, previous writings suggest that if she had chosen to maintain these same connections, she could have succeeded. The young Sylvia Plath was brilliant and full of vitality, despite her imperfections. If she had chosen a less destructive path to self-discovery, perhaps she could have remained as she felt at Smith: “…young, beautiful, and perhaps not too damned” (Diaries 140). Clearly, Sylvia Plath's desperation to identify and repair the disconnect she felt between her outer personality and her true self led her to isolate herself and reject others in an attempt to purify herself and perfecting himself, a process that is shown throughout his writings. In trying to understand herself better, she ended up losing herself completely. Although the inner workings of Plath's mind will remain obscure, it is possible to assume that ultimately she was unable to accept that her goals were impossible to achieve. The disconnect between who she was and who she wanted to be would always exist, and the world would never fully understand her, because even she couldn't. Plath herself explains it best: “Outwardly, all that could be seen passing by was a long-legged, tanned girl in a white lawn chair, drying her light brown hair in the late sun July afternoon, dressed in aqua shorts and a white-and-aqua halter top. Sweat comes out in wet, shiny drops on his bare, lean stomach, and periodically runs in sticky rivulets under his armpits and down the back of his legs. Looking at her, you couldn't tell much: how. in one short month of her life, she started, loved and lost a..