The Missing Relationship

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Recommended: Themes and poetic style of Sylvia Plath

Poet Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963 by inhaling gas from her kitchen stove (Werlock). What could have possibly caused her so much pain in her life that she ended it so early? The answer lies within her life and her poetry, a theme that is clearly repeated throughout her brief time on this planet: she searched and searched, but she could never find a genuine, stable male relationship/role in her life.
Throughout her career as a poet, Sylvia Plath wrote about many topics, ranging from death to women’s rights, but one of the most common themes throughout her poetry was her love/hate relationship with men. Her struggle to find a male figure that she could rely on lasted through all 30 years of Sylvia’s life.
Sylvia was born on October 27, 1932, to Otto and Aurelia Plath in Boston, Massachusetts (Wagner-Martin), where she lived for ten years. When she was two years old, Aurelia gave birth to Warren Plath, Sylvia’s little brother. Sylvia may have felt “rejected and possibly replaced by this new arrival” (Aird 3). Sylvia went on to say, when she was older, “A baby! I hated babies. I who for two and a half years had been the centre of a tender universe felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth. Babies!” (Aird 3). According to Barnard, Aurelia said that Otto Plath lived by his “Germanic theory that the man should be der Herr des Hauses (head of the house)”(14). Otto Plath was very sexist in the way that he thought and acted. He had really wanted a son, not a daughter, saying the day that Sylvia was born, “I hope for one more thing in life -- a son, two and a half years from now”(Barnard 14). This must have added onto Sylvia’s disappointment in her father.
Unfortunatel...

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...out how much it hurt her in the poem, describing it like a hunt, saying, “My veins glow like trees/ The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like/ A red burst and a cry/ That splits from its ripped bag and does not stop/ With the dead eye.” This really demonstrates how she still hadn’t found a reliable male figure in her life, because the man that she thought was true to her from the moment he met her had betrayed her in the very wrongest of ways.
Sylvia then proceeded to kill herself on February 11, 1963.
Sylvia Plath went through a lot of pain and suffering through her life. She lost a lot of important people, and she never really found that perfect man before she died. Sylvia has taught the world and its writers, even though it was a role she was trying her hardest not to fill, that women don’t need to listen to men and the way they think women should live.

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