| In a letter to Marcia the first use of the metaphor of a bell jar is seen – “Oh Marty, I have never spent such a queer summer. It is quite amazing how I’ve gone around for most of my life as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell-jar, all according to schedule, four college years neatly quartered out in seasons, with summers to be filled at will, hopefully, profitably, and never more than two or three weeks free at one time to worry about what comes next. Now, although the top would have seemed to have suddenly blown off, if I keep moving time will pass, being as time is but an emptying of wastebaskets, a deadly going out and in of doors, a brushing of teeth routinely, a marking off of spaces until the cycle comes round again”.(Butscher, 1976) Marcia came to see Sylvia and was upset and saddened by what she found – a very depressed, physically exhausted young woman in an almost zombie like state. Marcia felt helpless, unable to aid Sylvia in any way apart from offering a shoulder to cry on and showing deep concern, and she feared talking to Aurelia as she was fully aware of her hypersensitivity about her daughter’s mental condition. Sylvia tried to put up her own psychological shelter and immersed herself into writing and physical recreation only to find more despair at not being able to write. After some time Aurelia began to notice her daughter’s prolonged listlessness and more pronounced symptoms – Sylvia rarely left the house, was unable to sleep at night and could not hold a pen or pencil. Aurelia, being very concerned about her daughter’s health finally took Sylvia to the town’s psychiatrist. Perhaps it was because the psychiatrist treated her as a neurotic female instead of a severe depressive that he could not rescue her from this darkness and despair. After several weeks of private sessions Sylvia was recommended electric shock treatment along with intensive psychotherapy. However, the shock treatment only brought new fears and trauma and she was unable to rationally relieve her destructive depression. Sylvia began to make day trips to Boston, wandering aimlessly around the common, and then later she extended her trips out to her childhood town of Winthrop to re-visit familiar places and she also visited her father’s grave which sparked increasing anger at her mother seeing how the grave had been left neglected. From this point onwards it seemed there was no returning to the life of achievement, death beckoned and suicide became a definite goal with all that remained being the choice of method. “Sylvia had collapsed into a psychotic extreme or what psychiatry has labelled “schizophrenic melancholia””(Butscher, 1976). Sylvia scoured the newspapers for accounts of suicide and thought deeply about how to end her life. A vague attempt was made at slitting her veins with a razor blade, and later she tried to drown herself off the coast of Nauset Beach. It was late August that Sylvia first made a serious suicide attempt. Sleeping pills were the obvious and traditional method, and she was already being prescribed them though they were sensibly kept under lock and key by Aurelia. However, unknown to her mother, Sylvia had discovered where the key was kept and one Monday morning after hearing her mother go out she went and retrieved the sleeping pills, to her delight she found forty-eight remaining. Sylvia was not in a hurry and there was an air of calm about her. She left a note on the kitchen table saying she had gone on a long hike and would “be back tomorrow”. She then took a glass of water and a blanket and went into the cellar to the place she had a chosen a small crawl space for storing firewood under the porch of the house. She pushed aside the pile of logs and boards and hoisted herself up on to the concrete edge taking the water and pills up with her. She then put the wood back in place to create a screen so she could not be easily seen. She crawled to a far wall, wrapped herself in the blanket, and one by one swallowed forty of the pills. This suicide attempt was later described in “The Bell Jar” – “At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down. The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. The, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep”. As the Plath family returned home Sylvia lay unconscious under their feet. Aurelia was not worried about her daughter’s disappearance but as evening came she grew concerned enough to call the police and checked with neighbours as she knew that if her daughter had gone on a hike she would have called by evening. The police were helpful as were friends, and several newspapers put out notices the next day. The local police searched the cellar on their first visit to the house but did not find her, even the police dog could not sniff her out. Search parties were sent out to various areas with many people involved, and Aurelia great more and more distraught, her fears being confirmed upon the discovery of the pill bottle having gone missing. “Unaware of the constant turmoil in the world above, Sylvia was careering through her flashing lights towards the bottom well of darkness; but a part of her would not complete the voyage and struggled to survive like a trapped, panic-stricken animal. She moaned aloud, crawled to her knees, and started to rise; but her head hit the ceiling and she collapsed, striking her face against the concrete basement wall. Yet she was able in her unconscious state to gasp for breath and did not sink into a coma”(Butscher, 1976). But what kept her alive? Karl Meninger said that “every suicide appears to involve three, not one persons or personalities: the one doing the killing, the one being killed, and the one who is dying; that is one active attacker and two passive victims. For a terminal suicide, ruling out mere chance, all three must function in unison” so in Sylvia’s case it may be speculated that the hidden bitch goddess did not wish to be killed by an alternate self and chose to fight back fiercely to remain alive(Butscher, 1976). On Wednesday afternoon, Sylvia’s grandmother went down to the cellar to do the laundry and heard Sylvia’s moans coming from behind the stacks of firewood. She rushed back upstairs to fetch Warren, who came down with her and cleared away the logs but though Sylvia’s body was visible it was out of reach. The police were called in and soon they got Sylvia out and she was taken to Newton-Wellesley Hospital where hours later her condition was described as “good” by doctors. Less than a week after being found Sylvia was taken to the locked ward in the psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General Hospital. Fortunately, Sylvia’s sponsor for her studies, Mrs Prouty, heard about what had happened and decided to pay for Sylvia’s hospitalisation in a private institution and so Sylvia was taken to McLean Hospital in Belmont, one of the finest and most prestigious psychiatric hospitals in the state. To start with even the advanced techniques and individualised attention of McLean could do little more than maintain Sylvia’s physical well-being. However, as the weeks went by Sylvia regained her self-confidence in her writing and her multiple |
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