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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Her newly published, unexpurgated journals support a little-known theory that PMS drove her to suicide. Second of two parts.
Jun 1, 2000 | As a teenager, Sylvia Plath vividly understood the extent to which her body steered her. "If I didn't have sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time," she wrote in her journal in 1950. Ten days before her death, she had come to believe that "fixed stars/Govern a life." It turns out that Plath was probably right -- more right than she could have possibly known -- about her biology and her fate. But when Plath's journals were first published in 1982, what was most obvious about her was the supercharged nature of her emotions. Whatever causal agents may have been governing Plath's life, they were blown back by the force of her personality.
As unmistakable as were Plath's volatile emotions in the 1982 journals, the heavy editing of the text necessarily made it hard to discern the patterns to her moods. Even so, there did seem to be a detectable pattern, and it did not seem then, nor had it seemed to the people closest to her during the last years of her life, to be merely a function of temperament. In the weeks before her suicide, Plath's physician, John Horder, noted that Plath was not simply deeply depressed, but that her condition extended beyond the boundaries of a psychological explanation.
In a letter years later to Plath biographer Linda Wagner-Martin, Horder stated: "I believe ... she was liable to large swings of mood, but so excessive that a doctor inevitably thinks in terms of brain chemistry. This does not reduce the concurrent importance of marriage break-up or of exhaustion after a period of unusual artistic activity or from recent infectious illness or from the difficulties of being a responsible, practical mother. The full explanation has to take all these factors into account and more. But the irrational compulsion to end it makes me think that the body was governing the mind."
For at least the past 10 years it has been generally assumed that Plath fit the schema of manic-depressive illness, with alternating periods of depression and more productive and elated episodes. In the epic 1990 textbook "Manic Depressive Illness" by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, Plath is footnoted in a table listing major 20th century poets with documented histories of manic-depressive illness. Though Plath was never treated for episodes of mania, the authors concur that she would probably have been diagnosable with bipolar II, one of the two types of manic-depressive illness.
The description in the first paragraph of the book sounds strikingly like Plath: "Manic-depressive illness magnifies common human experiences to larger-than-life proportions. Among its symptoms are exaggerations of normal sadness and fatigue, joy and exuberance, sensuality and sexuality, irritability and rage, energy and creativity ... To those afflicted, it can be so painful that suicide seems the only means of escape; one of every four or five untreated manic-depressive individuals actually does commit suicide." Dr. Jamison, a leading expert in the field of affective illness, also includes Plath in her 1993 book, "Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament."
The hypothesis that Plath suffered from a bipolar disorder is persuasive. But in late 1990, another, even more intriguing medical theory emerged. Using the evidence of Plath's letters, poems, biographies and the 1982 journals, a graduate student named Catherine Thompson proposed that Plath had suffered from a severe case of premenstrual syndrome. In "Dawn Poems in Blood: Sylvia Plath and PMS," which appeared in the literary magazine Triquarterly, Thompson theorized that Plath's mood volatility, depressions, many chronic ailments and ultimately her suicide were traceable to the poet's menstrual cycles and the hormonal disruptions caused by PMS.
"Accurate medical knowledge of PMS has become available in the United States only in the last ten years, and Plath herself could not have known that her psychological experience was a result of a hormonal condition," Thompson wrote. "Yet the concerns of her work and the imagery of her poems suggest that she did have at least an intuitive understanding of the relationship between her fertility and her suffering."
In addition to cycles of death and rebirth and the motif of true and false selves, the major recurring themes to be found in Plath's self-reflective and ritualized poetic mythology are those of female fertility and power, and the controlling force of a feminine moon goddess. Thompson cited extensive medical research, including that of pioneering PMS researcher Katharina Dalton, to corroborate the results of her examination of Plath's symptoms in relationship to cyclic hormonal changes in PMS sufferers. She argued that some of Plath's poems, in particular those of the "Ariel" period, were not just figurative, abstract expressions of Plath's preoccupation with female fertility, but were directly correlated with Plath's biology. "Metaphors for ovulation and menstrual blood are prevalent in her late work," noted Thompson, "and the thematic oscillation from suffering to rebirth in these poems appears to follow the phases of Plath's own menstrual cycle."
