Nicholas Hughes
March 25, 2009
I’ve been torn about this post for a few days, feeling compelled to comment on the recent suicide of Sylvia Plath’s son, yet stunned into silence. I’ve also been concerned that sharing my thoughts on their family legacy would be exploitative, as I’ve been working on developing Plath’s novel The Bell Jar into a film for over five years.
Like many other people, I’ve been fascinated by Plath’s tragically short life, and an admirer of her writing. I don’t know much about Nicholas Hughes, except that his sister is the only surviving family member. Nicholas’ death stirs up a number of questions, particularly because he was only a year old when his mother commited suicide. I don’t have the insight or authority to speculate on his decision to end his life, and I feel it would be disrespectful. But I can offer praise to his mother’s work, if for no other reason than to lament that she wasn’t around longer to provide more of it.
Whenever I mention that I am working on turning The Bell Jar into a film, immediately people offer, “how depressing!” Not only is that somewhat dismissive, but it shows that the real tragedy of Plath’s suicide (for those who didn’t know her personally) is that it overshadows her writing. In a recent NY Times editorial, Joyce Carol Oates describes Plath as “a rare genius,” and I don’t think this is an overstatement. Sylvia Plath managed to combine her sensitivity with an obsessive dedication to the English language. She writes, “The blood jet is poetry, there is no stopping it.” Her words are potent and electric, and even as I write this, I realize how difficult it is to be that original.
In the poem Lady Lazarus, Plath describes regaining consciousness after her first (failed) suicide attempt. She writes, “They had to call and call/ and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls..” Plath often combines the beautiful and the grotesque, a testament to her hallucinatory imagination.
Is there a connection between creativity and depression? I think that dangerously romanticizes it. Maybe it is more accurate to say that creative angst is the culprit. But Plath died shortly after a creative surge, publishing Colossus and The Bell Jar.
The NY Times published a a series of editorials on Sylvia Plath as a result of her son’s death. It is a fascinating look at her life, her work, and the impact her suicide had on the people around her. It is immensely sad to think what life must have been like for her children to grow up without a mother. Nicholas Hughes grew to become a mature adult, and an individual in his own right, yet even in death he was unable to escape the shadow of his mother.
No one can really draw any conclusions, and the Plath legacy only invites speculation. I would like to think that Plath’s poetry can be appreciated regardless of her death, but the concept of suicide is provocative, inciting even anger and resentment. My sympathy goes out to those left behind to live with more loss.
Okay, you got me thinking again. The bell jar metaphor is a major premise when referencing the book. A bell jar is traditionally used in scientific studies to create and observe processes under a contained environment. A symbolism that is all to well established in the field of psychiatry or medicine for that matter.
I read that your movie interpretation of The Bell Jar is going to show the positive, more uplifting side of Esther. This is an important factor of the stereotyped depressed person that nothing goes right for them. They do not bring light and joy to the world, only negativity. This negativity has been accepted by society as a fact, leaving most depressed persons shunned from society as outcasts from the social norm.
Suicide statistics show that on average 30,000 people take their life ever year (10 out of 100,000). Interesting to note, in general since 1950 the average number of suicides have decreased. A staggering number considering the very essence of suicide. Is this due to prevention and availability of intervention? I truly hope so. Most depressed people (10% of the population) do not reach the level of suicide (15% of total depressed). Bringing suicide to light, depressed feelings is a positive action. It requires an optimistic approach but it can reach so many lives. Not only affecting the suffering but those around them. Maybe this light can bring balance to the darkness and some level of stability can be found in the mind.
Is depression anger towards inwards? How does depression allow the mind to see different insights to the world than the norm? To be able to reach into the ether and pull out the essence that so many have sought but so few can reach. Does the search for insight require pushing the mind further and further for exploration into the unknown without concern to the stability of mood? Where does it start and end and not lose the soul in the process?
The Bell Jar ends with her entering the room for her interview which would decide whether she was free from the hospital or not. The reader does not find out the outcome of the interview, and the novel ends with the words: “I stepped into the room.” Another interesting point (not sure if your movie will take this on). Are we truly free, will she be able to lift the glass jar again? Her freedom, like all others must be found from within.
I appreciate your delicate insight into the author and your honesty on the subject of mental illness. Your thoughts are compelling and for that I thank you. I look forward to your next post.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
I just read your letter to the President of Smith College regarding The Bell Jar. It is commendable the time and care you have put into this project. I truly hope you can reach your goal. Thank you for clarifying in the letter about the misconception of a “happy, lighter Bell Jar” (I must have read the same online article).
Is there a connection between creativity and depression, well apparently there is. I can not describe how frustrated this makes me…..
The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers, Kaufman, James, The Journal of Creative Behavior, Vol 35, Num. 1, 2001 pgs. 37-50
Abstract:
Although many studies (e.g., Andreasen, 1987; Jamison, 1989; Ludwig, 1995) have demonstrated that creative writers are prone to suffer from mental illness, this relationship has not been truly examined in depth. Is this finding true of all writers? In Study One, 1,629 writers were analyzed for signs of mental illness. Female poets were found to be significantly more likely to suffer from mental illness than female fiction writers or male writers of any type. Study Two extended the analysis to 520 eminent women (poets, fiction writers, non-fiction writers, visual artists, politicians, and actresses), and again found the poets to be significantly more likely to experience mental illness. This early finding has been dubbed “the Sylvia Plath effect,” and implications and possibilities for future research are discussed.
…But, I digress.
We ended up sitting by the bar and talking about the recent addition to her family, and, being that she’s a Poet, the conversation soon turned to tortured artists and the creative process.
And I was reminded of a video I saw from the TED conference by Elizabeth Gilbert dealing with the subject at hand. So I told her I would share the link with her as soon as I got home.
The video also made me think of all the creative tortured geniuses we have lost to suicide in the 20th & 21st centuries including Sylvia Plath.
Given your interest in Ms. Plath and “The Bell Jar”, and being that you are an artist yourself, I thought you might find the video interesting.
Even after a second viewing, I found it most engaging.
Cheers.
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html
While at NYU, working on my MFA I was fortunate enough to study and spend time with several writers who knew Plath (and Hughes), several of whom were close with her, and they had fascinating insights about her and her work. Somethign that came up again and again, was their joy at her life and their sadness at so many people’s focus on the drama of her life (real as it was) rather than on her creative, intellectual and technical prowess (she was, for example, as you probably know, not only an amazing poet, but a fantastic teacher). In turn, a book that came up a few times in talkig with these people in relation to the question of the link between creativity and mental illness was a fascinating book called Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jameson, a clinical psychologist, a prof at Johns Hopkins, and one of the foremost experts on bipolar disorder in the nation, and herself bipolar. The book looks at the lives of artists like Byron, Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh and others.
Another interesting book is Ted Hughes’s Crow, which is absolutely unlike any of his other books (in aesthetic, in content, etc.), and which is deeply in conversation with Plath’s poetry precisely because it seems to be speaking the very language of her poetry, and because it puts impicit biography into the context of fable and the visceral. Notably, these were poems Hughes began to write after, and seemingly in reaction to, Plath’s death, and which he stopped writing a few years later at the death of Assia Wevill (and their daughter, Sura). In the context of Plath’s poetry, in general, and Hughes’s Crow, psychic survival depends on saturating the object world with significance and I think that this is what redeemed the world for both poets.