The Bell Jar

In regard to this last issue, it is appropriate to look at the ethics of suicide. Perhaps it is even a time to reread Aquinas on "The Sin of Suicide" because we should consider whether or not it was "wrong" of Plath to take her own life and leave two very young children in the world without a mother. Is it not ironic that Plath did to her own children what she was so damaged by in her own life — the loss of a parent at a tender age? And last, how are we to judge a woman who bitterly criticized her mother and idolized her father, yet who chose the self-destructive path of the father (and Otto Plath, although not a suicide, certainly contributed to his early death, as is clear from all accounts, because he refused to seek early medical treatment for diabetes) and then, in the end, did to her husband just precisely what her father had done to her mother? Indeed, it is ironic that in Plath's poem "Daddy," she foreshadowed how she herself would end her life. In this poem, she identifies her father as a Nazi figure and herself as a Jew. "I thought every German was you," she says, referring to her father. She then goes on to describe an engine "chuffing" her "like a Jew" off to Dachau, Auschwitz, and Belsen. Sharply foreboding in the next sentence, she writes, "I may be a bit of a Jew." Here, it is time for us to recall how Plath died: she gassed herself. It is as if she could not escape some almost foreordained doom for herself. This is indeed some kind of reverse, perverse, and hostile "poetic" justice. We can conclude, even in our sympathies for Plath, that she was wrong, which does not mean that we are merely uncomfortable with her suicide, or that we only mourn. We can praise her brilliant work, and we can say, yes, she was a very good writer, and we can stand in awe of her complex, and intriguing, character. (She did have an authentic voice, as Ted Hughes notes in his introduction to her journals.) And we can continue to read her works and ponder over her too. But we can also criticize her for her last act, even if it was her "right" to do it.