In Woolf and Faulkner, the sensitive reader can find reasons to live as well as reasons to die. There is Septimus Smith (a suicide) in Mrs. Dalloway and Quentin Compson (a suicide) in The Sound and the Fury, but there is also Sally Seton and Mrs. Ramsey (lovers of life) in Woolf, and there is Dilsey and Dewey Dell, Addie Bundren, and Lena Grove and Isaac (all lovers of life) in Faulkner. We might conclude, therefore, that Plath either did not wish to hear, or did not hear, for some reason, the voices that said, "Live, live!"
There exists a sad quote from Plath's journals of the Boston period, 1958-59: "Take a lesson from Ted. He works and works. Rewrites, struggles, loses himself. I must work for independence. Make him proud. Keep my sorrows and despairs to myself. Work and work for self-respect. Study language, read avidly. Work." She wishes to take a lesson from another writer, and her desire to find a good role model is hampered by the complexity of the fact that she is married to Ted Hughes, another poet. She desires independence and self-respect, which she deserved, but side by side with that wish is a greater desire to make her husband proud. Thus, her compulsion is to work — for someone else's approval. In this single quotation, we can see a driven, lost human being in conflict. Plath searches for order only in books and work. Did she ever think that she might try to live, to exist, to wander down the road of life like Lena Grove in Faulkner's Light in August?
No wonder the paths of so many gifted writers of this period led to the mental hospital. And it should be noted here that both Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Hannah Green's (also a pseudonym for Joanne Greenberg) I Never Promised You a Rose Garden were published in 1963, the year in which The Bell Jar was published — and yet, of the three writers, only Plath committed suicide. It was due — at least in part — to Plath's work and her dramatic end that the early women's liberation movements in the United States were spawned. This led to a great surge of literary writing by women, a fact that should lead us to a serious contemplation of the major ideas of the era that preceded the new "freedoms" for women because only in a clearer understanding of that recent history will we avoid another time of tragedies for the Sylvia Plaths of the future.
