| During her sophomore year Sylvia continued to maintain her high standard and gained straight ‘A’s’ despite taking several difficult classes, and to her Art and Creative classed were a pleasure rather than work. She concentrated her efforts on being popular on campus and engaged in more extracurricular activities included attending concerts and plays, participation in traditional “step-sings”, voluntary work teaching art at the town’s welfare centre and she spent a few hours a day working on the school newspaper. A friend from Wellesley called Buddy was accepted to Harvard as a medical student and after much pressure from Sylvia he relented and let he accompany him to Boston’s Lying-In Hospital one evening, the visit proved to be crucial for both Sylvia and her poetry. Sylvia accompanied Buddy to his classes, observatory lessons and intern observations – it was an experience most likely to be shocking for anyone unfamiliar with hospital routines but for a “repressed, sensitive and sexually unsure young girl” it was devastating. The events of this long and traumatic night were faithfully recorded in “The Bell Jar”. Throughout her time at college Sylvia exhibited “many, many facets”. Her behaviour in groups could change so drastically from being quiet and self-contained, pleasantly tolerable and attentive to companions, to becoming almost hysterical with chatter and talking loudly to try to remain in the conversational spotlight. For someone to understand Sylvia at this point is to understand the complexity of her divided personality. Thought Sylvia was not diagnosed schizophrenic she was three people who were in a constant battle with another for domination. There was Sylvia the modest, bright, dutiful, hardworking, very efficient child of middle-class parents; Sylvia the poet, the star on campus who was destined for great things in the arts; and Sylvia the “bitch goddess” who ached to go on a “rampage of destruction” against all those who had what she did not and who made her cater to their whims. As well as these three main Sylvia’s/personalities there was also Sylvia the sad, little girl who was still hurting from her father’s rejection and abandonment of her, a girl who wanted to crawl back to the safety of her mother’s womb; and there was Sylvia the ordinary teenager who yearned for a kind husband, children and a house, one like her grandmother’s by the sea.(Butscher, 1976) “One sure sign of Sylvia’s lurking psychosis, in fact, was the thoroughness with which she shaped and maintained the first two “masks” – abstractions of self that constantly threatened complete emotional detachment…She remained narcisstic and totally committed to self; but the self had become an uncertain projection of a splitting ego”(Butscher, 1976). But the public portrait of Sylvia was that of a normal, happy, brilliant and outgoing young girl who was dedicated to duty, art and scholarship, and who could play tennis, impress others with her renditions of popular tunes of the piano, date Ivy League men, and write sophisticated poems and stories in her free time. Sylvia’s junior year at college did not get off to a good start. Tuition fees had been raised meaning she was forced to leave her dorm, that meant losing Marcia. She was enrolled to the Honor Program in English, this gave her the freedom to concentrate more on the literature and writing classes that most interested her. Sylvia was also given the good news that she was one of the twenty-five students in her class who had a grade point average of 3.6 or above. She sent in anonymous contributions to Smith’s own poetry competitions, the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize and the Ethel Olin Prize contests, and to the surprise of the judges she won both. But poetry was beginning to wear off as a disguise for Sylvia and as the fatigue set in the immense emotional pressure built up which had to be released as freedom or failure. Near the end of April she went to Yale for a special weekend celebration. She was a pleasant guest at the apartment of friends but the inner emotional turmoil and uncertainty could no longer be completely suppressed, her splitting personality was pulling at her causing her to give conflicting views. She struggled at college and for the first time in her academic career she got a ‘B’ which brought about the end of her hopes for Summa cum laude honors. For her thesis she chose to write about James Joyce’s use of twin images which most likely reflected Sylvia’s keen and consistent insight into her own dual nature. Sylvia sent in some of her work to Mademoiselle and was accepted as one of the two student guest editors so she spent June at their office in New York. Upon meeting the editor who would be supervising her she was asked where she saw herself in twenty years, flustered by this question Sylvia answered “doing editorial work and teaching” only to be reminded “health before genius”. Sylvia impressed the editors with her work and intelligence by her behaviour in New York was always a “conscious and rather brave attempt to fight despair and mental paralysis”, an attempt to construct an alternative self that was a more sophisticated Sylvia who could laugh at her own inadequacies. New York was such a large place compared to her relatively confined hometown and Northampton, it was frightening for Sylvia being away from the safety and security of home. Sylvia spent much time with others but the most psychologically dangerous were the times spent alone exploring the city and its riches. The vicious circle that had driven Sylvia’s life since her father’s death had reached a point where her secret rage against the world and her father was being turned inward. Solitude was no longer essential and creative but now dangerous and unproductive. She maintained the mask somehow and appeared a rather shy yet pleasant young woman though it must have been a huge struggle. At the end of her time in New York Sylvia was asked to pose for a photograph and it turned out to be the breaking point, she was no longer able to rely on method to mask her deep unhappiness. She broke down and wept before posing and from this point even the simplest and commonest tasks seemed to difficult to complete, her energy was depleted and she “could not care about life to exert the slightest effort on her own behalf”. When Sylvia left New York at the end of June she was “numb inside – trapped in the hurricane eye of mental paralysis and headed for destruction”. Sylvia hoped that upon returning home she would recover but the situation was tense with her grandmother being seriously ill and her mother in great pain from an old ulcer so she had to act as carer. To add to this came a major blow that almost shattered Sylvia’s “frail equilibrium”, her application for a creative writing class at Harvard’s summer school was rejected. Thus she had a whole summer to fill whilst all her friends were away and I was to be a very lonely time. |
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