Everyday Canvas

On Sylvia Plath and Life Choices

Prompt: “Why are we conditioned into the strawberry and cream, Mother Goose world, Alice in Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?” Sylvia Plath
What is your take on this?

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I like reading Sylvia Plath for the deep sensitivity in her poems, but lacking such a morose outlook on life, especially one like Plath’s, I don’t find the above quote applying to me.

To begin with I was not "conditioned into a strawberry-and-cream" childhood. As good and at times as tragic my growing-up years were, I was also exposed to and cautioned about the difficulties and not-always-such-fun responsibilities of living a life, possibly by astute adults. Imagine my surprise when my life--so far--turned out better than I expected, given the warnings I was subjected to. It was also that most women then had had the worst that the society handed out to them, and they warned me while expecting me to conform at the same time. In spite of all that, when the same understanding tried to pull me down with it, I rebelled against the "women's place" ideas.

I have to add that Sylvia Plath also lived around the time, my time, when younger women her age came to the realization that they were given the lesser second-class roles in life. Surprisingly, these fake roles were pushed on to the next generation by mostly the older females in those days. My guess is, while Plath's childhood might have been a happy and joyous one, she got stuck between the two warring generations and expected her freedom and her happiness to be handed to her from the outside, possibly by her husband Ted, who couldn't or didn't know how to pull her out of her misery or what she calls "my madness." Furthermore, there is that fact of Plath's suffering from a possible bipolar disorder.

It may just be that a too-much-fun childhood has its faults in preparing people to real life, and alternately, expecting the worst can give people relief when faced with a less harsh reality and can cause them to be thankful for everything even if that same negative expectation robs them of ambition. I only hope that the new generation of mothers can find a happy medium between the two poles to raise their sons and daughters in.

Here’s Plath’s advice to novice poets, but it is also about life, too. Would it hold any truth or not, like the above quote, each poet has to decide for herself and himself.


Notes To A Neophyte

Take the general mumble,
blunt as the faceless gut
of an anonymous clam,
vernacular as the strut
of a slug or a small preamble
by snail under hump of home:

metamorphose the mollusk
of vague vocabulary
with the structural discipline:
stiffen the ordinary
malleable mask
to the granite grin of bone.

For such a tempering task,
heat furnace of paradox
in an artifice of ice;
make love and logic mix,
and remember, if tedious risk
seems to jeopardize this:

it was a solar turbine
gace molten earth a frame
and it took the diamond stone
a weight of world and time
being crystallized from carbon
to the hardest substance known.

Sylvia Plath