Plath, in an attempt to deal with the great pain and anxiety of her life, focused her fears on the fear of death. This eventually became an obsession with her and thus led to the suicide attempts. She did "attempt to assure self-expansion" by writing about her inner experiences. This is the heroic part of her life — the fact that she did produce good poetry, as well as the fact that she did struggle in an attempt to insure some kind of immortality. But she could not get past the death theme and on to her life impulses — at least Plath's writing does not show us that she could do that. A poem that she wrote in the month of her death shows Plath returning to "that cadaver's head . . . like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar," an image that she mentions on the first page of The Bell Jar.
In her poem "Balloon," Plath tries to write about life, focusing on the Christmas holiday she has just celebrated and on a baby boy squeaking a balloon. Yet, in the end, the balloon is burst, leaving only a shred of red in the baby's fist. The poem's early images are disembodied, and then the end comes, with nothing. We recall the first lines of Plath's last poem, "Edge": "The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body . . . "
Dr. Johnson, an English essayist of the eighteenth century, said that the prospect of death concentrates the mind. We see that principle operating in Plath in a perverse way. Her death thoughts, however, led to excellent poetry. But her poetry never became a path to freedom from those thoughts. We see that The Bell Jar was an attempt at self-analysis, perhaps an attempt for Plath to cure herself. Yet it did not work. She was able to transform her fears and phobias and obsessions into literature, yet the literature did not become a way for her to save herself. Was it just that the poetic gaze into the abyss was too much for Plath? Did she become too enamored with the abyss? Did the high of creativity, the drug of writing poetry make Plath think that she could escape the pain of life somehow, and when she couldn't, she turned that anger on herself? For some reason, Plath was never able to get beyond or above, or over, her childish fears of life and death, and maybe even her fear of sex. She was not able to get to that point where the adult knows that life is to be lived and lived as an act of faith, as an act of courage. One must at some point, eventually, decide to choose life, not death. At this point, death becomes an adversary. Death is not the "sweet drug," not a friend.
We sympathize with Plath, however, who became tired of her struggle. We remember how the death of her father, when she was eight, affected the rest of her life, and of how, when she was eighteen and troubled after her summer in New York City, she wanted only to join him in his grave. Clearly, Plath desired — sometimes more than death — a superior power, or force, to give form and authority and form, and thus a sense of happiness, to her early life. Then he was gone, and she tried to replace him, as she so bitterly tells us in "Daddy": "I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look." Her art was an attempt to give herself to something with a life force and a possibility for immortality. Yet, in the end, her death force won, and her anger that she expresses in the line "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" is turned back on herself. Only death, ultimately, will not disappoint Plath.
