In this criticism of Plath's ethics, we might note Joyce Carol Oates' "The Art of Suicide." Oates talks of "the suicide who is transfixed by metaphor," an idea that certainly applies to Plath, who often seemed to get her poetic visions and insights mixed up with her real-life problems. Was part of Plath's problem her sense of how good a poet she could be? Seemingly, she had little humility; she thought that she should not be bound, like other human beings, to cleaning up baby puke. But did she become so lost in her stream-of-consciousness poetic state that she was not able to come back to reality in order to deal with the mundane? Indeed, the mystic state of creativity is a realm where one is, in some ways, disoriented, like the absent-minded professor, but still, at the same time, one's creativity is clear and focused. It was this non-creative world that Plath could not deal with, especially after a period of intense output; these periods occurred at the end of her life, just as they did after her periods of success before her suicide attempt. It was as if Plath had post-partum depression from finishing her work, or couldn't deal with the dullness of life after a great outpouring of creativity.
Oates says that "the suicide who deliberates over his act . . . rejects our human condition of finitude . . . his self-destruction is a disavowal, in a sense, of what it means to be human." Suicide is a denial of the mystery of life, a rejection of the future, whatever the future might hold. For whatever might lie ahead, human beings have a duty to affirm life, to give up notions of total human control. We must, as Camus' Sisyphus did, descend the mountain with joy and continue with our tasks and our struggles. Suicide seems as though one is taking control of destiny, and yet one is not. Suicide, as Oates says, ends only in "deadness," for suicide is not some kind of creation. Plath's last poem was not a poem at all. And one of Plath's legacies to us is her last negative statement.
